The King of Cold Mountain
by atippleofyourtears
Summary: Deep in a cold place in the earth, an ancient winter spirit has awakened, one that faded and went to sleep long before Jack Frost stood on splintering ice with his sister. With a deadly cold front spreading over the world, Jack and Bunny must put their differences aside to help spring prevail - and to prevent Old Man Winter from eradicating the young upstart that's taken his place.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N**: Just a few notes: This is third story in "The Guardian of Screwing Up" series and it's a bit darker than the other stories in the series, as it's the story that's sort of a faux sequel to the movie and the big "sequel" stories we have planned are always going to be a little more intense. However, the violence and darker aspects are going to be very fairy tale in tone and atmosphere.

There's also going to be some light Jack/Tooth, but we're still categorizing the story as gen as the emphasis is on plot and the whole ensemble's relationships (especially Jack and Bunny's friendship) rather than romance.

We'll also be trying to update this once a week, if we can.

* * *

**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders and Saph

* * *

**Chapter 1**

Some stories start with "once upon a time in a faraway land."

In this story, the time that was once upponed was March in the year 1695, and the faraway land was the Smokey Mountains of what would someday become Tennessee.

The cold winter in the Smokies was starting to turn to a balmy spring that year, but someone wasn't happy with the change. In Jack Frost's opinion, the green that was emerging through the melting snow didn't look nearly as nice as it could look if it were white and frosted over. Also in Jack Frost's opinion, the only thing more fun than frost and snow was covering green, growing things with frost and snow all over again. And so the frost spirit laughed as he flew over the forest, swinging his staff to spread his frost over the trees, his laughter resounding through the mountains.

Occasionally, he touched down to jump from branch to branch for the sheer challenge of it. The world was all so new, and very, very exciting - so exciting that Jack found he was only sad very rarely, like when he tried to talk to someone and they didn't answer back. Being sad was boring, and he could always find so much to do that was not boring instead.

His cloak billowed in the breeze as he landed in a clearing, where a brook bubbled nearby. He touched his staff to the water, watching with great interest as the ice spread over the surface. Delighted chuckles bubbled from his mouth at the sight of it. Even now, the things he could do with his staff were novel and he wished he could take credit for his work when others saw it.

Out of nowhere, an unfamiliar wooden object flew through the air and shattered the ice. The crash was so forceful that the object remained lodged in the riverbed as the current carried shards of ice away around it. Jack, through his surprise, inspected the thing, a sort of angled wooden crescent. It looked like a human-made object, but he hadn't seen any of the humans in this part of the country using them.

He reached out to grab the thing for a closer look, but a sudden movement on the ridge overhead and an unfamiliarly accented shout caught his attention.

"Back off it! I see what you've been doing here."

An animal jumped from the ridge to the riverside and rose up on its hind-legs. It was a rabbit, but enormous, far larger than rabbits naturally grew. Jack, new to the world, knew even this. He also knew that rabbits typically didn't talk.

Another thing he knew was that, typically, _no one _talked to _him._

"You can see me?" he said, immediately excited. He flew over to the giant rabbit, hovering close to get a good look at him.

The rabbit, grey and white and marked with black shapes like leaves unfolding, leaned back from Jack's inspection, frown deepening at the invasion to his personal space. "Of course I can. Did you think I wouldn't notice?"

He reached into a leather satchel and pulled something from it - a flower from a little further south, still set as in glass with a solid frost.

"What exactly do you call this?"

Jack stared at the flower and then back up at the rabbit's face. "Improved?"

Jack had never seen a rabbit snarl - or loom - until now. "I call it a bad idea." The rabbit put the flower back in his bag and pulled out his other boomerang. "Whoever you are, you don't belong here anymore. Easter's next week and I better not see so much as a snowflake below the northern colonies, or I will personally escort you to the southern hemisphere myself. You got that?"

"I'm Jack Frost," the boy said in response to the 'whoever you are,' leaning on his staff, amused by the rabbit's pique. "Why can't I stay here?" He hopped up and landed on a frost-covered tree branch, gesturing to the icy designs scrawled on the bark. "Everything looks better this way. The green isn't anywhere _near _as good."

The rabbit's eyes narrowed, his voice dropping into tones of deep anger. "Are you _this_ new, or are you t_rying _to start a fight with me?"

Jack flipped upside down on the branch and hung from his knees, tired of staying still. "How new is new?" After all, for all he knew it was only yesterday that the hare had come out of a...a whatever it was that rabbits came out of that was like coming out of a pond.

"Ever heard of spring before?" The rabbit crossed his arms, his eyes narrowed at Jack's antics.

"Mmm," Jack's eyes looked upwards as he tried to remember, only since he was upside down, that meant he looked downwards. "No?"

But then he hadn't actually _heard _people say most of what he knew; he just already knew it all. Spring was a thingum, he knew. He was aware it was a concept. Until he overheard enough people talking about things he knew of to get context, he had a lot more trouble understanding the immaterial.

The rabbit heaved a sigh that was slightly less aggravated, and muttered to himself, "He_ is _that new."

He removed the flower from his bag again. The ice had started to melt and the petals were drooping a little.

"Look, I'll give you a fair go. There is a cycle to everything in the world and right here, right now, that cycle is winter into spring. You belong in the southern hemisphere, and this -" he waved the now sodden flower under Jack's nose " - belongs here, where it _should _have been allowed to grow in peace."

Jack considered the words, taking in everything the rabbit had said about the cycle of things. It sounded all rigid and structured and methodical and...

"Boring. I think I'm just going to ignore it." Jack re-iced the flower with a touch and flipped himself back upright, laughing just out of the rabbit's reach.

The rabbit said, "Think again," and tapped one of his feet on the icy ground.

The tree beneath Jack exploded into bloom. The branch supporting him sprouted twigs that became new branches, which wound a cage around Jack. Before he could even begin to ice through them, vines twining through the leafing, flowering branches pulled his staff from his grip. Suddenly he was falling, and falling, even though he had only been a few feet off the ground when the tree reached up to trap him. The cage of branches was open enough to let in light, but the only light they let in was dim, as if it was shining from a great distance. The smell around him was damp and earthy, and there was no wind at all - yet he was flying along, pulled by some other unfamiliar force, tumbling through a great stretch of distance until sunlight suddenly pierced his cage, which rolled to a stop on thick grass.

The branches fell apart, leaving Jack sprawled in the sticks in an unfamiliar field. There were huge mountains rising in the distance in one direction, and in the other, trees covered with leaves that weren't green, but red and orange, and overwhelmingly, yellow.

The rabbit was standing nearby, arms crossed, frown unfriendly. He kicked Jack's staff towards him with one foot.

"Where are we?"

"Aotearoa," said the rabbit. "In the Southern Hemisphere. Where March means a nip in the air, not new growth."

The south wind, strangely altered with a chill that made it friendly and familiar, rustled the leaves of the poplars. The rabbit's tone took on a hint of softness as he said, "There's a time for everything, and everything in its time. Here, it's time for winter to come again. That's the way of the world, and it's right."

He paused for a moment, looking distantly over the poplars, before glaring at Jack again. "So get to it, Frost. You've got a whole autumn to put to an end - and don't even _think _about trying to prevent spring here either, or we'll have more than words."

Jack wanted to fly straight back to the mountains in the north to keep turning the green back to white, just to be a pain in the rabbit's fluffy tail. Laughing at someone who could hear was new, and fun – no one had ever paid him any attention before, even if it was irritated attention.

But the yellow trees in the distance looked fun, too. When he'd been born in the pond, everything had been icy and the leaves had been gone from the trees. He was still so new, he hadn't seen a tree with leaves on it that still needed his help to fall. He picked up his staff, waving it in the air, and watched as frost spread over the yellow leaves. They snapped from their branches and danced away in the wind. Jack watched their twirling trail with building excitement and took to the air. He let out a loud whoop as the friendly southern wind picked him and hundreds of leaves up in one go. Before it could carry him off, he turned back to the rabbit.

"Hey, bunny rabbit," he said, his voice very serious, as if he was about to tell the rabbit something important or thank him for showing him this new place.

"What?" the rabbit's body language said he was still unmoved by Jack's levity - but maybe there was a shade less hostility in his tone.

In one deft movement, Jack whipped the snowball he'd sneakily formed behind his back into the rabbit's face, then flew away. His laughter filtered back to the rabbit on a wind that was rapidly cooling.

Bunnymund sputtered, knocked for a loop by the snowball and by having been off his guard to get hit by anyone at all. With a shiver and a sigh that was close to a growl at the cold wind ruffling his fur, he tapped his foot on the ground and dropped back into the still-warm Earth.

It was not the only time the two would meet, but it was a good preview of the meetings to come.


	2. Chapter 2

**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders and Saph

* * *

**Chapter 2**

They typically encountered each other every few decades, on the cusp of spring awakening and winter fading. Whether it was Jack laughing maniacally while frosting the flowers Bunny spread during 1700s -

_"Frost!" _

- or Bunny getting the drop on Jack in 1835, stringing him up by his ankle with some vines, out of reach of his staff -

_"Hey! No fair, you overgrown rodent!"_

_"Southern hemisphere or bust, Frost." _

- or, for instance, a particularly excessive blizzard in 1968 -

_"It's Easter!"_

_"That's still winter...ish."_

_"It's Easter and this is __**Georgia**__!"_

_"Did you know," Jack said, leaning casually on his staff, speaking with a mock-informative tone of voice, "that they've never been able to ice-skate on Lake Allatoona before? Pretty far out, right?"_

- the conflict was only ever postponed, rather than finished. It depended entirely on which side you were talking to whether winter was crossing boundaries it shouldn't or spring was interrupting the party too soon.

The pranking only got better after Jack became a Guardian, partially because North joined in, partially because a recent upswing in monsters to fight brought Jack and Bunny into close contact for pranking convenience much more often. After the mission to Africa, when Bunny got a few good pranks of his own in and Jack, in his rashness, nearly got them and Sandy killed, things were tense for a while. But there was only so long Jack could restrain himself before the urge to get the Easter Bunny with some payback became too strong to resist.

One of the joint efforts between him and North had involved North offering Bunny some carrots and telling them what cabinet they were in – and neglecting to tell the rabbit that said cabinet was completely packed with snow Jack had put there. It had taken Bunny a good minute to dig himself out of the snowdrift that fell on him, and North and Jack a good five minutes to stop laughing after he had.

Some of the pranks were spur of the moment, like the time Jack got all the elves involved in a rousing game of tackle football in the workshop. When Bunny popped in to talk to North about something strange he'd seen with his tunnels, Jack, mid-game, tossed the ball to him. Bunny caught it on instinct and suddenly found himself under a pile of about twenty elves. Jack had laughed so hard at the sight of Bunny struggling under an elf-pile that he couldn't concentrate enough to stay airborne and had fallen to the floor in a fit of mirth.

The trick with the snowglobes was the best by far, and Jack and North used it more than once. It was too easy to take advantage of the fact that they could send Bunny absolutely anywhere and he'd be back a moment later by tunnel with only a few minutes lost, just by hiding the right snowglobes in the right places. They typically sent him to locations that were harmless, but which no one in their right mind wanted to find themselves in, like Cleveland, Hoboken, and once, Albuquerque (with the suggestion he take a left turn there this time).

The last time they did the snowglobe trick was after Jack, North, and Bunny had patched up a little situation involving a wendigo. Jack had done much better this time than he had in Africa, which had been a recent trend in his outings with the Guardians. Now that he was listening to those with more experience, asking the right questions, and paying more attention to need-to-know information, he was making fewer mistakes, and hadn't put anyone in a dangerous position as a consequence of reckless action.

Not that it stopped Bunny from being critical - even overly critical - of the mistakes he _did_make.

It frustrated Jack to no end, hence the snowglobe prank as soon as they got back to the pole. This time, the choice of destination was a little ill-advised, but even North had thought it was funny when they picked it. In fact, North and Jack fell over each other with laughter as Bunny popped back out of the ground, dripping wet and covered in duckweed.

"Oh haha, very funny," he said, flicking the duckweed from his ears. "The Everglades, great place to send a rabbit without warning. I landed on an alligator."

"I'd think after all those saltwater crocs you Aussies spend your days wrestling, one measly little American alligator would be a picnic," Jack snarked.

"It was, but that's not the point."

"Come on mister Nerves of Steel, lighten up!"

"Alligator was not part of plan, but still, a good prank," North agreed. "All have laughs, a little fun –"

"Fun for you, at the rabbit's expense," Bunny drawled, his voice as dry as his fur was not. "Yeah, that never gets old. Now if there's no actual business, I've got a full day."

Jack scoffed. "A full day of what, watching the grass grow? Making sure the trees still have their leaves?"

Bunny glared at Jack, stamped the ground, and disappeared into a tunnel.

"That went well," Jack said, only half scoffing, but North looked thoughtful when he turned back.

"I am making people work together, making strangers become friends all the time – but always, Bunny is so sensitive to any jest. Is one egg I cannot crack."

Jack shrugged. "Maybe dumping him on an alligator _was_ a little out of line."

"Maybe in retrospect, is not best prank ever to be playing, but alligator was not part of plan," North agreed. "Still, now that the Guardian of Fun is among us, perhaps between you and me, we will see a few more smiles from the hare. Yes?" His eyes twinkled with familiar mirth as he clapped Jack on the shoulders. "And now my friend, Bunny is not only one with work to be doing."

With that, North departed for his workshop. Busy, busy busy. It was the hallmark of the Guardians - aside, perhaps, for Jack.

Yes, there were snow days to cause and, of course, the occasional blizzard, and he was enjoying frosting up windows more and more for the artistry of it now that he was actually getting credit for his work. But it was nearly addictive, being talked to, having people listen to him. Not to mention the physical affection: they hugged him, they patted him on the back, and they ruffled his hair. Jack felt like he'd never be able to get enough of it, of being touched, of being able to reach out to other people. It was needy, though, Jack knew, so asking for the amount of attention he wanted was out of the question. He didn't want to annoy them. If he ever got too clingy, they might stop letting him hang around at all.

As he'd told the Guardians once, he wasn't hard work and deadlines, he was snowballs and funtimes. But while snowballs and funtimes had sustained him for three hundred years, now he craved attention and contact more than ever – since he could actually get it.

Sometimes.

When they weren't busy.

"Sorry, Jack, I'm swamped right now - Topeka, both front teeth, and watch out ladies, there's a storm front rolling through – and even thought Baby Tooth has done very well with covering for me sometimes, I think it'd be a little too much for her."

"Oh." Jack tried to hold back the disappointment in his voice, but it was difficult. He knew Tooth's job was important to her though, and aside from being important to her, it _was_ quite frankly more important than him. In the big picture. "That's okay, I understand. I'll catch you later."

"Jack," Tooth said, taking him by the hand before he could go. "When I have time, I promise we'll do something together."

Jack gently squeezed her hand before flying off.

Sandy was busy as usual, too. He tried to keep up in conversation with Jack as he worked, but the multi-tasking became a little too much for him. He started blending ideas from the dreams he was creating into the conversation by accident. When their discussion inexplicably turned into something about monkeys riding dinosaurs, Jack realized how much he was distracting Sandy from his work. As much as he wanted company it wasn't fair to the Sandman, who was always working – after all, there was always a child sleeping somewhere – so Jack excused himself from the conversation.

"I should probably head off, Sandy. Gotta bring the first snow a few places in the Southern Hemisphere," he lied. "I'll see you later?"

Sandy nodded and gave him a smile as Jack flew off into the night.

Truly, the only one of the other Guardians that even had any free time was Bunny. North had his slow days in the late winter, but production at the pole was constant – Sandy and Tooth's work was even more so, especially with the population of the world as high as it was these days, compared to how it had been in the past. Bunny was the only Guardian whose duties were inherently rush work.

But Jack was on the outs with Bunny, so swinging by for a friendly chat was out of the picture. Still, any attention, even negative attention was better than sitting around Burgess freezing and refreezing the pond, right?

Bunny was already having a conversation when Jack snuck into the Warren with a stolen snowglobe. Bunny's conversation partner, a grey-furred, long-snouted marsupial about a foot tall, noticed Jack's entrance. Bunny, his back turned to Jack, did not.

Jack waved at the Easter Bilby, who stared at him with confused recognition and lifted a finger to get Bunny's attention."Uh -"

Bunny was holding some painted leaves, looking at them with a critical eye. "Is this a color test? This is nice. Good work, mate."

The Easter Bilby glanced from Jack to Bunny again, as Jack put his finger to his lips in a "shhhh" gesture and Bunny dropped the compliment. "Yeah it is," said the bilby, whose Australian accent was even thicker than Bunny's. "I was going for sunrise on waratah."

"Teardrops are coming along well too," Bunny went on, still going through the painted leaves, which were covered with single-brushstroke shapes. "How long did all these take you?"

Jack flipped up to the top of the stone for a nice clear view. Bunny still didn't notice a thing and Bilby glanced at Jack again, his expression uncertain.

"About ten seconds a leaf. New personal best. Er -"

"Good to hear," said Bunny, handing the leaves back. "Bring it down to five over the next year and she'll be apples."

The bilby sagged with disbelief, Jack forgotten. "Ah come on mate, I only just broke ten. I've been practicing all year."

Bunny's voice took on a conciliatory tone. "I'm not saying ten's not a good personal best, I'm saying speed painting is something you never stop practicing. Even I still do - all year."

The bilby rolled his eyes. So did Jack, feeling sympathy for the marsupial. The Easter Bilby was practically a newborn, having been first believed in as recently as the sixties, and he hadn't asked to share a holiday with a fussy stickler like Bunny.

"You say that like I'll ever _need_ to be that fast," grumbled Bilby, almost too quiet for Jack to hear. "Easter's much too established with rabbits, even in Oz. I'll never convince a whole continent of kids to make the switch."

"Are you kidding?" Bunny knelt down, a little closer to the bilby's eye-level. "Mate, you're just starting out and you've already got a load of believers. You're already leagues ahead of me, timewise. You want to know a secret?"

Bilby eyed Bunny curiously, then glanced at Jack, who was also leaning in curiously. "Uh - sure mate, but -"

"Australia was the last place I visited, when I started leaving the Warren," Bunny said, charging through the Bilby's attempts at pointing Jack out. "I had to learn how to survive everywhere else before I even _dared_ tunnel to the surface right above me, but you were _born_ there." He pointed to the roof of the Warren, and presumably, to the Australian Outback above them. "Up there is the most dangerous, unforgiving landscape known to any creature on this world, and you _belong _there in a way rabbits don't. Everything out there can kill you, and it hasn't, because you're a survivor, born and believed in. You're a natural symbol of hope. The Aussie kids'll see that. Give it a few more decades and they'll take to you, every one."

Bilby still sighed, and Jack really had to strain to hear. "And what if they do? What if all the kids take to me, and you're right, ten seconds isn't good enough? What if I'm too busy running from a taipan to hide the eggs right? I could let 'em all down. That'd be just awful."

"Nah, don't even worry about that." Bunny shook his head. "That's how it goes - the more work you do, the more the kids believe you can do it. And when they believe you can do it, you _can_."

"But what if they don't -"

"They'll believe in you," Bunny said, confident. "I know they will. I do. And until they all do, the whole continent, you need a hand, you know where to find me. Sound fair, mate?"

Bilby, straightening a bit, nodded at the encouragement. "All right, yeah, sounds fair."

Bunny held his fist out to the marsupial. "Glad to hear it."

The bilby tapped his much smaller fist against Bunny's. Jack saw his moment, and iced their fur together.

Bunny sputtered at the sudden shock of cold, and at the realization that he couldn't pull his fist away from Bilby's. "Oh, come on. Jack!" He stood up as best he could, which was about halfway, crouched not to pull the bilby into the air.

Jack laughed and Bunny spun, glaring at him. "What's the big idea?"

Jack stood up on the standing stone, grinning. "No idea, just thought I'd drop in, say hi to an old buddy." He waved to the bilby. "Hey, Bilby old pal. How's it going?"

Bilby waved back with his free paw. "G'day, Frost."

Bunny rolled his eyes and sighed. "Right, well, you've said it. Mind un-icing us?"

"I had a question first," said Jack, scratching his head with his staff. "What was it - oh yeah! So, the Centurion Toto-kin - am I pronouncing that right?"

Bunny's ears dropped in surprise. "Where did you hear about the Centzon Totochtin?"

"That's it!" Jack exclaimed. "The Four Hundred Drunken Rabbits - sorry, that's the Three Hundred Ninety Nine Drunken Rabbits now, isn't it? Doesn't have quite the same ring to it."

The Bilby sputtered with laughter that petered out as Bunny didn't join in. "What, really? _You?"_

"You ran into Anansi again, didn't you," Bunny said, his tone resigned and flat. "What were you doing in Africa?"

Jack wiggled his fingers. "Flurries on Kilimanjaro last week. Anansi was in the mood to catch up. And boy did he catch me up. The trickster hare tales, Br'er Rabbit, the drunken Aztec party bunnies…about the only thing he _didn't _catch me up on is when exactly you got so _boring."_

Bunny's flat frustration hadn't shifted. "Don't you have something better to do than break into my warren? I'm training the new guy here."

Jack walked along the rock he was standing on, mostly on tiptoe, casually swinging his staff.

"So, when there's a new guy in town," he said, his lighthearted tone betrayed only by his white-knuckled grip on his staff - "Are you always this nice to them, and was I the only exception? Or is it just folks who come to take some of your workload that get the welcome mat rolled out?"

Bunny's expression, thus far one of mild irritation and frustration, dropped. He inhaled for a moment in silence before turning to the bilby. "Mate, you mind giving us some privacy for a moment?"

"I'd love to," said Bilby, who very clearly would have loved to excuse himself from this awkward scene, "but -" he shook his fist, still iced firmly to Bunny's.

"Frost, give us a hand."

Jack shrugged and said blithely, "I do the freezing, not the unfreezing."

Bunny sighed, and looked entreatingly at the bilby. Bilby looked back at him for a moment with a 'well what am I supposed to do?' expression before plugging one of his ears with his free paw, scrunching up his shoulder to press it against the other ear, and whistling a rendition of "Waltzing Matilda."

It wasn't a situation that leant itself to earnest, heartfelt discussion. Bunny sighed at the roof of the Warren.

"Look, Jack - when you first showed up, I -"

But Jack had caught sight of something on the standing stone that he'd never looked closely enough through the Warren to see before.

"What's this?" He brushed moss away to find carvings, old and weathered, of rabbits about the size and general shape Bunny was when he was tiny and fluffy.

Jack laughed. "Oh wow, this is rich.Don't tell me that you have _that_ much of an ego that you have self-portraits plastered all over this place."

Bunny waved his paw. "Forget those. What I'm trying to say is -"

"No, no, I'm intrigued," said Jack, brushing more moss aside. "I mean, I always knew you were full of yourself, but these are a lot of - are they all over the others too?"

"Jack, leave them," said Bunny, a hint of a warning in his tone. "I'm trying to tell you, it wasn't -"

"No way! They're everywhere!" Jack flitted from rock to rock, brushing aside moss to reveal carvings of bunnies - painting eggs, weaving baskets, crafting exploding eggs, on and on, leaf-like pictograms of the preparations that went into Easter. "You must have spent centuries carving these. Is this what you do when you say you've got a full day when Easter's a good five months away? Sit here carving odes to yourself? What're they called, the Four Hundred Thousand Stuffy Rabbit Killjoys?" He peered closely at one of the carvings. "And when did _you_wear a lab coat and -" he snorted. "Are those goggles?"

The stamp of Bunny's foot on the grassy floor _thundered_ through the Warren. The standing stones shook and the moss on them exploded to lief, covering the carvings completely. In an instant, every stone was covered, every carving hidden by new, green growth.

"Get out."

The command was as soft as the footfall had been thundering, but no less resonant.

Jack looked at Bunny in the sudden silence. He'd snowed Easter out. He'd frosted the new-grown crocuses and blown the new buds from the branches.

But he'd never seen Bunny this angry before.

"You break into my home, pry into my business, for what? To keep this ruddy stupid game of winter-versus-spring going? Well it's not a _game_, Frost. It never was. No matter how hard you try to make fun of everything_, _some things _never will be_."

Bunny paused, inhaling a breath that was more to steady himself than to replenish his air.

"Now get out of my Warren."

Jack floated away from the stone, his jaw hanging open slightly. Arguments that he hadn't done anything wrong surfaced in his mind, but none of them seemed strong enough in the face of Bunny's cutting anger.

Jack turned, his eyes watering a little (had to be the pollen, right?) and flew through the nearest tunnel.

Bunny sighed and dropped his gaze to the grass. Beside him, Bilby cautiously tugged against the ice holding their fists together. It gave, to his great relief.

"So I'll uh, see you around," he said, awkwardly. "Uh - good luck with, uh - all that. Hoo roo."

Bunny waved him off without a word, and the bilby disappeared down one of the nearby tunnels.

* * *

As he always did when he didn't know where else to go, Jack headed back to Burgess. He didn't have the heart to bring a snow day, but light, mournful flurries fell from the sky as he alighted gently on the lake, freezing the surface on contact. The ice under his feet reflected the light of the moon as he sighed and walked along the surface.

It was during times like this that he almost wished his heart was harder. Oh, he tried to act like he didn't need anyone sometimes, but even he wasn't self-deluded enough to think that was anything other than a front. Sometimes he wished the front was real, that he didn't need people, and that he didn't long for companionship.

Sometimes he wondered if colder was better. If he were colder, then knowing that the person who'd greeted him first in his new life with such hostility hadn't _had_ to would hurt him less.

But then he remembered all the warmth in his life, warmth from the other Guardians, and from the kids. He remembered bits of warmth from his old life, from his mother and sister, and he knew that the price paid in loneliness was worth caring about people.

Still, it was a steep price to pay. Particularly when it was so clear that the loneliness he'd endured in his first 300 years as Jack Frost hadn't been inevitable.

Someone _could_ have taken him, new to this strange existence, under their wing. Nothing had been stopping them from doing it. They didn't have to wait for the Man in the Moon to make Jack's purpose known in order to be kind, to be welcoming to him. They'd just done it because they were busy. Or just…because.

Jack sat down on the ice and rolled back to lay there, staff in hand, looking up at the sky, at the stars beaming down, and, of course, at the moon.

He had been born in this pond and he had died on this pond – though not necessarily in that order – and he wondered if the Moon really knew how hard it had been for him. He wondered if he knew how hard it was now. Sometimes he wondered if Manny cared at all, then felt guilty for thinking that of the being that had saved his life. Even without being seen, he'd experienced so much joy in in the last 300 years that he wouldn't have had the chance to if he'd died forever on that day.

"Is this…how it works?" he asked Manny, his voice sounding fragile even to his own ears. "When people can see you? Always needing more than they can give?"

As ever, the moon was silent.

"It's…almost worse now. Because they're there and sometimes they give me their time but that makes me want more of it than I ever needed before this. And now I know you're there and you talk sometimes so it means you just never choose to talk to me."

Silence.

Jack's eyes welled up.

"I need more than this," he said, his voice a harsh whisper as he admitted the thing he found he just couldn't say to the others. "It's better now, but sometimes I still feel so alone, because now they're there. They're there and they just don't have time for me, but I know it's not fair to ask for more of their time. And I don't know what to do about it."

No answer, of course. No guidance. He wasn't really surprised about it - there never was.

Jack closed his eyes and lay there on the thin layer of ice spread over the pond.

"Jack?"

Jack sat up abruptly. Jamie stood at the pond's edge in a coat, boots, and pajamas.

He bounced with excitement as Jack sat up. "It is you! I knew it was you! We weren't supposed to get any snow today!"

Jack had seen Jamie off and on through the last…was it almost a year now? He'd made sure that he and his friends had a great winter with many a snow day, snowball fight, and sled race. Still, he hadn't ever stayed long. He was always there in glimpses, starting the fun and then flying off, always keeping them on their toes. Jack's reasoning was that belief was a fickle thing. If they thought of him as something concrete rather than magical, what if the nature of their belief changed? So he darted in and out of Jamie's life and the lives of his friends, giving them their fun and their joy and disappearing again so they could only look on in wonder.

Jamie had put on a little height even in the last few months, his front tooth long since grown back in. It made Jack realize with a pang that by zipping in and out he was also _missing_ out.

Jack smiled at him, standing up, and was about to say hello when Jamie stepped onto the thin layer of ice without checking to see if it was thick enough. He'd gone two steps before his foot broke through, but Jack had already flown forward and caught him, zipping him back over to the bank.

He was yelling without realizing how loud his voice was.

"You never, ever go out on ice until you're sure it's thick enough!" He clutched the collar of Jamie's jacket. "Never ever! Do you hear me? You never do it!"

Jamie looked up at him with wide eyes, breathing harshly, and Jack backed away, letting go of his coat.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, Jamie."

He didn't even try to excuse it. He just backed a few steps before taking to the air to fly away

"Jack, wait!" Jamie called out. Jack paused in the air, looking back. "Are you okay?"

Jack tried to force out a "yes" that sounded believable, but found he just couldn't force himself to do it.

"Not really."

"Then how about you don't fly off, and you come over here and sit down, and we'll talk about it," Jamie said in conciliatory tones, sounding like a tiny therapist.

Jack almost laughed. "I'm not gonna dump my problems on an eight-year-old."

"I'm nine now."

Jack actually laughed at that this time. "Oh, sorry, I understand that a year makes a big difference when it comes to being qualified to listen to moody winter spirits whine."

"Yeah, well, it does," said Jamie, firmly. "Come sit down. I stole some cookies to share with you when I was sneaking out."

Jack was moved that Jamie had even thought to do that. He finally flew over and sat down next to the boy. After scaring him, the very least he could do was make sure Jamie knew it wasn't over anything he'd done wrong. (Also, cookies. How could he turn down cookies?)

Jamie gave him a large chocolate chip cookie and started munching on his own. "Now, what's wrong?" he asked, spewing out some crumbs.

Jack munched on his own and thought about it all while he was chewing. "If I…told you things about myself and they weren't, I don't know, all impressive and magical, if they were just very…human, would it change you believing in me?"

"Like if it turned out you were secretly an alien instead of a magical spirit? Or a mutant? Or an_interdimensional _alien (or mutant)?"

"Something like that, yeah," said Jack.

"I belief in adiens, doo," Jamie said around a mouth full of cookie. He swallowed. "So not really. Besides, it's hard not to believe in somebody when they're trying to protect you from the bogeyman. You could have been just a normal older kid doing that and I'd still have believed in you."

Jack looked at him, at the honest affection on his face, and decided to take a risk and hoped it panned out. So he talked, about waking up in the very pond they were sitting on the bank of. He talked about all his years alone and about the fight with Pitch. He talked about getting his memories back, and the life he'd left behind when the ice cracked - and how scary it was ("So that's why you were so upset about that." "Bingo. I'm sorry I yelled at you, though, you scared me for a second.") And he talked what he'd meant in the alley about his center.

It all spilled out and the talking brought him into the now, into feeling aimless even though he was believed in, in wanting people's time even when it wasn't fair to ask for it. His chance of a family had died when he did and he didn't know how to articulate that to the Guardians, namely because he hadn't figured out how to tell them he'd even died at all, fearing their pity. So far, he'd just explained that he'd been made a Guardian because he saved his sister and left it at that.

"Three hundred years," was all Jamie could say. The two of them were lying in the dirt at the edge of the pond, looking up at the stars. "You know, a lot of people would go crazy from that. I read a thing about monkeys, where someone raised some in complete isolation and they went insane."

Jamie turned to look at Jack, his eyes going wide and bugging out of his head at the word "insane."

"Yeah, well. I was still around people, even if they didn't see me."

"It makes sense you're lonely though," Jamie went on. "You should tell the other Guardians about it."

Jack held out his hand for another cookie and Jamie placed one in his palm.

"What? No way. Then they'll be all weirded out and guilted into spending time with me and they'll think I'm clingy or something. No, I just have to – I just have to find a way to deal with this."

"If you're ever lonely, you can always talk to me," Jamie said. Something in his tone made it clear that it wouldn't just be for Jack's benefit, that he'd enjoy spending time with Jack, too.

"I appreciate it, but like I said, you're eight –"

"Nine."

"Right, nine, sorry, but you have friends. You have a life – one I will gladly rain snowballs and fun on, but you don't have to –"

"Maybe I want to," said Jamie. "You're my friend."

It was as simple as that. Jack was his friend and he liked spending time with him. It was a child's thinking, that friendship could just be declared and it could be fun and happy and uncomplicated by things like work and fears of intrusiveness.

"And you're really cool," Jamie went on. "…no pun intended. I mean with all the stuff you can do and how brave you are and everything."

"That pun better not have been intended," Jack said warmly. "I don't _do_ ice puns."

"Anyway, whenever you need someone to talk to, I'm here," said Jamie. "We can hang out."

Jack looked over at the boy and smiled at him. "I think…I think I might take you up on that."

It felt good to know that he didn't have to be alone. (Also, that he might be able to score more cookies later on. They were pretty good.)

* * *

In the dark places of the world, something was active, something that controlled the shadows as much as he dwelled in them.

His activity meant that other things in the dark had become restless. He hadn't woken any of them on purpose, but his presence alone had sent them slithering up to the surface to wreak havoc, keeping the Guardians busy.

Pitch Black had never been the type to look a gift horse in the mouth.

It had taken him time to find this particular place, but he knew he'd found what he was looking for the moment he'd walked in. It was cold deep in the shadows, but not usually _this_ cold.

This was the cold that froze the marrow in bones and stripped life away from living things like it had never belonged to them in the first place. It was the cold that settled in someone's soul when they found themselves trapped outdoors in a blizzard and knew they wouldn't get out alive.

Jack Frost had turned down his offer of an alliance between the cold and dark, but he wasn't the only being in the world that could provide the ice half of the equation.

Deep in the shadows, buried under thick ice, an old man lay – haggard, frostbitten, and dreaming.

The thing about dreams was that they could be turned into nightmares and when people had nightmares, they often _woke up_.

"Rise and shine," Pitch said softly in his oily tones, coaxing the old man's dream into something dark and cold – something that involved small children cowering from a chill wind. "Or perhaps I should say 'rise and shadow,' shouldn't I?"

The old man's eyes flew open, grey irises flashing under the ice.

"After all, the sun won't be shining anymore."


	3. Chapter 3

**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders and Saph

* * *

**Chapter 3**

If becoming a Guardian had brought one constant comfort to Jack's life, it was that no matter how busy Tooth was, the minifairies were always happy to see him.

Especially when he brought a toothbrush.

A line of minifairies at least a hundred long trailed around him, waiting their turn to be brushie-brushed as he sat on one of the many platforms of the Tooth Palace. The fairies loved the preening and being the focus of his affection, and Jack, much as he never would have admitted it, loved the attention.

The odd thing was that Tooth had told him the fairies weren't just linked to her, they were a part of her, even if they were their own separate little beings at the same time. It was confusing and it made him wonder about a few things. Like why when he was doting particularly on one of them, brushing until they they were squirming blissfully in his hands, Tooth, up in her control nest, would blush and avoid looking in his direction.

He knew he was causing that blush. He just didn't know what exactly the feelings behind it were, and he was terrified to ask. Pointing it out might make it awkward, and making it awkward might make Tooth put a stop to it. Jack liked his fairy time too much to risk losing it.

Another thing he wondered was what it meant when the minifairies made kissy faces at him, or nuzzled up close to his neck or – disturbingly – tried to crawl into his shirt and had to be fished out before they got too handsy. Was that their crush or hers?

Regardless, the fairies adored him, he adored them, and in a way it was like spending time with Tooth even when she was too busy to spend time with him. Combined with the time he spent with Jamie, it was helping to soothe his remaining pangs of loneliness.

"Okay, cutie, time's up," said Jack, as he floated up towards the control nest where Tooth did most of her organizing. "Time to give some other lucky fairy a - turn?"

He was surprised to see that Tooth wasn't in her control nest, calling the shots - Baby Tooth was. The gold-feathered minifairy looked up from chirping out assignments to wave at Jack, smiling hugely, and he waved back awkwardly with the hand that held the toothbrush before looking around for Tooth.

She was a few columns away, sitting at the edge of a platform, sipping tea - with Bunny.

For a second, the absurdity of the scene made Jack laugh, but as Tooth and Bunny continued to sit, chatting companionably like they took tea breaks all the time, his amusement turned to curiosity. He drifted closer, ignoring the disappointed chirps of the fairy that had flown into his hand for brushing.

It occurred to him as he landed that listening in on Bunny's conversations hadn't gone well for him the day before, but that was the point when Bunny said, "It isn't just the pranking, Tooth - he gets himself in trouble, he gets everyone _else_in trouble -"

Jack was about to rally to his own defense (who else would Bunny be talking about?) when Tooth did it for him. "Now come on, that's not true anymore. He's gotten a lot better. You haven't been on every mission to see his progress. You know what I think?"

Bunny "hmm'd" around his cup.

"I think you wouldn't be here looking for an outside opinion if you were really ready to write him off completely. Am I right?"

Bunny grunted, and for a moment Jack couldn't figure out what that meant. "I thought after the fight with Pitch - he really saved my skin, convincing Jamie to keep believing in me." Jack saw Bunny's fur stand on end, and the rabbit shuddered as if remembering the feeling of being that close to fading. "But now instead of just carrying winter on late, he's breaking into my home, dropping me on alligators -"

Tooth giggled. "The snowglobe trick?"

"The snowglobe trick." Maybe it was Jack's imagination, but Bunny could have sounded a touch…amused. The amusement had faded when he spoke again. "I just thought things between us would be getting better, not worse." He stared gloomily into his tea "I can work with him - for the kids - but maybe it's just time everyone accepted that Jack Frost and I are too different to be friends."

It hurt. Jack tried to tell himself that it didn't, that he didn't care, and who wanted to be friends with some stuffy, uptight rabbit anyway?

But it hurt. Their past squabbles aside, he was actually coming to like Bunny. The rabbit could be fun, and he could be funny, when the mood was right. Jack, for all his years alone, was actually a fairly good judge of character (hence not siding with Pitch, among other reasons) and it was abundantly clear that Bunny cared immensely about the kids and the other Guardians.

That was why the comment about them being too different stung in its own way. Seeing Bunny playing with Sophie had seemed like a reflection of how he'd wanted to play with the kids himself, back when he still couldn't. If Bunny couldn't even see they had that in common, if Jack hadn't made it yet abundantly clear how deeply they cared about the same children and the same ideals – would anything Jack did ever be enough to change his opinion?

"I don't know," said Tooth, "I wouldn't say you're that different at all. Actually, I think you're a lot alike."

Bunny scoffed. "Where do you get this stuff?"

"The tea?"

"The crazy notion," Bunny explained. "Though the tea is good too. Actually, where _do _you get it?"

"There's a market in Delhi - but my point is, I think Jack gets on your nerves because you're more alike than you want to admit."

"Ah, you're not making any sense."

"Think about it. You're both brave -"

"Too right," Bunny agreed. Jack was somewhat heartened that Bunny at least thought he was brave.

"- hotheaded -"

"I - hey," Bunny objected.

'Hey,' Jack mouthed to himself.

"Extremely stubborn - and don't you hey me," said Tooth. "Where was I? Oh yes, a little lonely -"

"Don't start," said Bunny, and there was a vulnerability in his voice that Jack knew never would have been there if he'd had even an inkling Jack was listening. "Not after my day."

Tooth put a gentle hand on Bunny's paw, and it occurred to Jack that he'd never seen any of the other Guardians touch Bunny unexpectedly without him freezing up.

"I want to see you two getting along as much as the next Guardian," she said, her voice motherly and gentle – "but the only person you can talk to who can make a difference about this is Jack. You know he's not hostile. You know he's just trying to play with you. Why aren't you playing back?" She cracked a smile. "If even half the stories I've heard are true, Jack's not the only one whose misspent youth involved at least a little irresponsibility in the name of adventure. Am I wrong?"

Bunny heaved a sigh, not meeting her gaze. "That's just it though – nobody's luck holds like it did for us in Africa every time. He's a good kid – a good Guardian, even – but if he rushes into anything and a kid comes off the worse for it – I don't want to see him hurt over that. If I can do anything to prevent it – I mean, if I'm not hard on him now, you and North and Sandy sure won't be."

Jack's unhappiness softened a little. On the one hand, it bothered him that Bunny still assumed he was going to get someone, much less a kid, hurt. On the other, if Bunny was being so hard on him because he cared…that didn't make it any less annoying, but it did at least mean that Bunny didn't think of him as badly as his attitude suggested. That soothed the hurt a little.

"Because we've seen him grow," said Tooth, calm and reasonable. "Because the parts of ourselves we see reflected in him aren't the parts that unsettle us most."

Bunny looked at her in silence for a moment, and Jack expected him to respond angrily.

Instead, Bunny laughed. "You're not cutting me any slack today, are you Sheila?"

"Talk to him," Tooth insisted. "He can't stop crossing lines if he doesn't know they're there to be crossed at all."

"Yeah," Bunny scoffed, "I'll do that, talk about my feelings with the guy who could do with some more ammunition to mock them."

When had he mocked them? Jack wondered. Okay, so he'd played some pranks, but he was hoping Bunny would laugh and join in. And he poked a little fun at Bunny's self-absorbed self-portraits, but…

… but Bunny was one to complain about using feelings as ammunition. He sure hadn't pulled any punches with his "nobody believes in you" stuff that day Jack had been dragged in a sack to the Pole.

Maybe Jack had been a bit vindictive back at the Warren, but Bunny had been downright hostile with him for centuries. It only hurt now that Jack knew he didn't treat every new myth that way

The baby fairy cradled in his hands finally decided she'd done enough waiting, and chirped loudly for attention. Jack shushed her but it was already too late. Bunny looked around, alerted by both the chirping and the shushing.

"What the - " Bunny stood up, teacup still in hand, glaring at Jack. "How many of my private conversations are you going to eavesdrop on?"

"Relax, Bunny, he comes here all the time," Tooth said. "The fairies like his company." She waved at Jack, smiling, as the fairy in his hand chirped demandingly.

"Tooth, why didn't you tell me he was here?" Bunny asked, clearly angry that he'd been spilling his heart out in a place Jack could hear.

"Because I knew if I did, you'd tunnel off without actually confronting your problems. And isn't that convenient! Now you two can talk it out like responsible ancient myths," said Tooth. "Looks like my cue to get back to work." She drained her teacup, put it down on the tray, and zipped back into the air.

Jack and Bunny looked disbelievingly at each other, then back at Tooth.

"Hey, hang on, can't you just -"

"Maybe a neutral party would -"

"I'm sorry, is my name the Counseling Fairy?" Tooth plunked her hands on her hips, raising one feathered brow at them. She was willing to talk, clearly, but had no intention of solving their problems for them. "Let me think - no, it is not. You boys be nice now."

She zipped off. Bunny and Jack looked at each other, then rolled their eyes in opposing directions.

"You know, I came here to see the fairies, not talk feelings with _you_," Jack said, eyeing Bunny still with some resentment. As much as he wanted his whole strange Guardian family to get along with him, Bunny's intensely critical approach to everything Jack did was hurtful and confusing. The only way to deal with it was to open up about his feelings, and there was no way he was going to do that with Bunny.

Especially since Bunny didn't seem interested in exposing his feelings either.

The rabbit shrugged. "Yeah, well, I've got a lot of work to do anyway. Can't sit around brushing the fairies with February over."

A moment of awkward silence hung in the air before Bunny loped off to the edge of the hanging palace floor to tunnel back into the earth through one of the rock walls

Unbidden, Pitch's words returned to Jack's mind. "They'll never accept you." Well that wasn't true. Sandy, Tooth, and North had accepted him just fine.

It was just starting to look more and more like Bunny never would.

Jack settled down and the rest of the fairies gathered in a little flock around him. They cooed and chattered at him comfortingly, sensing his sour mood. Baby Tooth, relieved of her duties, flew over to join them and landed on Jack's shoulder, hopping over to nuzzle his neck and face.

"Oh, tiny tooth fairies," Jack opined. "At least you guys get me."

They all nodded eagerly, and swarmed in for a group cuddle. Unfortunately, since there were so many of them, this meant that he was pretty much covered in fairies.

"Ladies. Can't breathe," Jack said, his voice muffled by tiny winged bodies.

A giggle filtered through the fairy barrier and they parted. Tooth floated before him, wings buzzing, surrounded by a group of other mini-fairies relaying her orders.

"You're bringing it on yourself, you know," she said, smiling. "You're spoiling them rotten."

"Says the one that cuddles them constantly."

"They're mine. I'm allowed to cuddle them constantly."

"At this point, I'm pretty sure they've decided I'm theirs, so it's the same thing, just in reverse," Jack said, standing up and tucking the toothbrush in his pocket. All the fairies sighed in deep disappointment. "I'm guessing if you had to get back to work, you're too busy to go do something, huh? No chance of a day out in the field?"

"Sorry, I only had a few minutes to have tea with Bunny," Tooth said, shrugging apologetically. "It's too heavy today to leave Baby Tooth with all the responsibility."

Jack nodded ruefully, but didn't complain. He smiled at her, and that spurred Tooth to take him by the hand and float upward.

"But what I was thinking was that I still have time here and there. I know it's not the same, just hanging around while I'm working, but if you stay up in the nest with me, you can hang out with me and the fairies?"

"That's…that's fine," Jack said, trying to keep the eagerness out of his voice. "I can brush the ones on their breaks while they rest."

He just wanted to be…wanted. The way she was smiling at him made him feel that way. So he floated up with her towards the nest, beaming happily at her.

"You and Bunny didn't talk, did you?" she asked.

There went the smile, gone in a flash. Jack replaced it with an eyeroll.

"There's no way I'm talking to His Stuffiness about his hurt ego when he won't even give me a fair chance. You heard him. It's like, okay, we used to butt heads constantly, but then we were okay – then I mess up on _one _mission and that's it." Jack waved his hand in a cutting gesture. "Every bad thing I do is worse than if someone else did it, and all the good I do isn't good enough. Why should I give him a chance to fix it if he won't give me one?"

They were in the nest now, and fairies gathered around to get instructions.

"Because the only reason you're afraid to try is because if you open up and expose yourself and he still rejects you, it'll hurt, so it's easier not to try at all."

Jack narrowed his eyes, working his jaw to figure out what to say, but she'd already turned away from him.

"Okay, ladies, I need two of you to head to Tallahassee, there's two canines, two different houses, same street, oddly enough. And get those teeth tucked away – oh wait, let me look first, I don't blame you, they're adorable – but get them tucked away before you drop them. Let's not have a repeat of 2006. It took us forever to find Amelia Jensens's molar."

When she finally turned back, he was still working his jaw.

"So I'm being stubborn about this because I'm that sensitive, huh?"

"Yep," said Tooth.

"And you, of course, know me just that well to know that."

"Yes," she said. "You're an open book, and even though I've been busy, I've gotten a lot of library time in since you joined the team, haven't I?"

That was true, Jack had to admit. Even though it was all stolen time, put it all together from the last few months (almost a year now) and it meant they'd talked endlessly.

It was weird having someone that was starting to know him better than he knew himself. That was what was throwing him. He'd never _had _that before.

"I'm not afraid of – of…"

"Of being alone? Of being turned away or rejected?" She turned away to relay a few instructions to the mini-fairies, leaving him posturing and puffing out his chest at the empty air.

"That's not fair," he said, frowning. "Don't talk to me, like – like –"

"Like the front you put up is as obviously fake as North pretending he doesn't have a problem with cookies?" she said, turning back.

"On that note, he's starting to worry me," Jack reflected. "It's not the health issues, since we don't have any, but you know, there's psychological dependency -"

"And there's the sarcasm." She floated right in front of him, swaying softly in the air. "Jack, you don't have to pretend you don't care about things. After seeing how hard you've been willing to fight to protect the kids, after the time you've spent with all of us, it's a pretty thin disguise, sorry to say."

Jack just stood there, staring at her, looking and feeling just a little lost.

"Stop it," he said quietly, not angry or sad, just confused.

"Stop what?" she asked.

He had to search for the words and settled on, "Knowing me."

"Does it scare you?"

"Does it scare me? It terrifies me," Jack admitted, his voice going slightly raspy. Shrugging self-consciously, he confessed, "Even if I've always wanted it."

She arched an eyebrow, the feathers of her head crest twitching in what he'd come to recognize as a sort of sardonic movement. "Get used to it. It's all part and parcel of having friends who care about you."

She was floating terribly close, swaying like she always did in the air, her feathers catching the light and shimmering with the movement. The movement was what always drew him in. That was a thing with birds, right? Movement was a way of communicating, it was a way of – of attracting other birds.

Wait, where had that thought come from?

And, holy moley, where was _his _movement coming from? He found himself moving in closer, his face heading straight for hers, in a movement that wasn't being guided by conscious thought but rather by something zinging up from the base of his spine. If he kept moving forward, their mouths were going to collide.

_Abort! Abort! What are you doing? Tactical avoidance!_

Jack ducked to the side just in time, pressing his head to her shoulder, hoping against hope that Tooth would think that was what he'd been planning all along. It seemed to be what she settled on thinking because after a half second of freezing in place, she alighted on the ground and wrapped her arms around him.

Geez, he loved hugs. Forget North and his cookies, he was the one that was starting to have a problem. Hug addiction. Being able to be close to her – uh, to someone in general - it was all he could do to keep himself from breathing her in. Sniffing someone was creepy, after all, no matter how good they smelled (the rare times he smelled her, it always seemed to be a mix of the strangely sweet smell of feathers, the dully sweet smell of nag champa, and something floral like rose or jasmine).

Not that he spent that much time thinking about how she smelled. Nope.

"I know you want him to get along with you. You just need to talk to him."

"Who?" asked a slightly dazed Jack, trying to see if he could casually sneak a nuzzle in.

"Bunny."

"Oh, right. Bunny. We were talking about Bunny."

Tooth drew back to look at him. "I know it doesn't seem like he has reasons for the way he's acted towards you, Jack, but he did." She paused. "He doesn't necessarily have them anymore, but if we're honest with ourselves, we're _all _a little slow to change."

"What reasons are those?" Jack asked.

She shook her head. "It's not my place to tell you."

Jack sighed and Tooth let him go, hovering back to work.

"I'll talk to him," he groused, sitting down on the floor. "_Maybe_. If he stops being such a – a –"

"Grumpy Gus?"

"He's the grumpiest of Guses, I'm telling you," Jack said, plopping down and grabbing the toothbrush. The off-duty fairies gathered eagerly around him as he went to work, cuddling them and scritching them all their fluffy little hearts desired.

There was a light blush on Tooth's face again, and Jack, his curiosity burning, couldn't let it lie this time.

"Tooth, if the fairies are, like, an extension of you, do you… is this something you can feel?"

"I can feel what happens to them, even if I can't see what they see or tell where they are. If they're scared. If they're happy."

"Is this making you uncomfortable or…?"

"No," she said, ducking her head and smiling, throwing herself back into her work, barking out orders like she had no time for chitchat, no sir, none at all.

Jack couldn't help but smile to himself as he brushed away at the mini-fairy chirping and squirming happily in his hand.

It was right then, in that moment of warmth, that everything went cold. The world turned to blinding white and fell out from under him. He was drowning in the pond, surrounded by cold, and yet walking out in a blizzard at the same time, the wind tearing at his cloak, whipping at his wool cap. He was gasping for breath, choking under the water, and at the same time the chill wind was stealing the air from his lungs, driving him to his knees.

The world was going dark, either way. The cold was stealing into his heart, into the very core of him and his life was leeching away. The same thought overlaid itself, an inner voice that was young and yet also very old: _Please, not like this._

Then the cold was in his bones. The world went dark, and in the shadows, eyes were gleaming at him – with irises as pale grey as the sky during a blizzard.

In their gaze he felt the deepest rage he'd ever felt, the most virulent hatred possible, all directed at him.

He woke, gasping, panicked, Tooth hovering above him.

"Jack!" She was shaking him by the shoulders. "Jack, wake up!"

"What? Wha – where. I saw – he was – he was looking at me, he was - he was - and –"

"Jack, calm down. Calm down. Breathe."

Jack was lying on the floor of the control nest. Tooth's face swam into clearer focus, surrounded by Baby Tooth and the other mini-fairies, all wearing fretful expressions.

Jack breathed deeply several times. "What happened?"

"I don't know. I turned around and you were lying on the floor. Baby Tooth says you just fell over unconscious."

Jack fought to remember his dream. It was fading quickly.

"I had…a dream. A really, really weird dream. A nightmare."

"Is that something that normally happens to you? Just passing out like this?"

"No, I barely sleep. Just like the rest of you - I only sleep if I want to, or if I've gone months without it, or if I got hurt, or if something exhausting happens."

"We should go to North's and gather up the others –"

"No, no. It's not – it's not a big deal. I think I might have just nodded off."

Now that the dream was fading, it didn't feel like a big deal. The frightening feelings were drifting away on the wind, the biting cold hard to remember in the pleasantly temperate Tooth Palace.

Tooth frowned. "But you just said –"

"I know, but I haven't slept in…a while. Not since Africa."

"Jack…"

"I'm fine. I don't feel weird or anything." Jack sat up to see if it still held true when he was upright – it did. "I think I just got too comfortable and nodded off. Had a bad dream. That's all."

Tooth didn't look too convinced. "If it happens again, I want you to go to North's and have him gather all of us. We don't get sick, Jack. If you're passing out, it could mean something serious on a much deeper level than the physical."

"Alright alright. I will." Jack nodded. "I promise."

* * *

After that, Jack didn't have any other strange dreams. Still, he thought he sometimes sensed something odd in the air, like a presence that hovered nearby, but wouldn't show itself. He worried for a while that Pitch had escaped his underground prison to stalk him in the shadows, but Pitch never showed himself. No one did.

A strange feeling wasn't enough for him to seek out the other Guardians, though, when they were so busy. And oh, were they busy. New toy lines, Easter approaching, and the usual hustle and bustle of teeth and dreams.

So Jack, in his freedom, spirited Jamie out of his room a few nights a week. Sometimes they just went flying, to see what everything looked like from above. Sometimes they got up to mischief, parking up on a roof to throw snowballs at the people down below. Sometimes Jack just set Jamie down to play with other kids in another country, so he could meet people and see more of the world.

Jack never thought he'd get enough of seeing the wonder in the kid's eyes.

Like the wonder he saw as they sat on an ancient stone overlooking a beautiful desert landscape, watching the sun rise.

"How's the kebab?"

"S'really good. What's in dis?"

"Goat, maybe? I have no idea."

"I like it," Jamie said, munching away. "Can we go to India next time? I wanna try, um. That stuff. Tandoori? And Japan for sushi? I keep trying to get my mom to let us try different foods for dinner but she's not really adventurous."

Jack laughed. "I promise I'll take you on as many culinary adventures as casual theft permits. That's one of the great things about flying; international food that's actually international."

"It's waaay bigger than it looks in pictures," Jamie said of the pyramid reflecting the light of the rising sun. So's the Sphinx."

Jamie looked down at their seat. (He looked down on account of the fact that the Sphinx was what they were sitting _on_.)

"Just about everything looks bigger in person. It's the rule of pictures. They can't contain all the presence of the important stuff. That's why it's so great to see it all in person," Jack lay back on the stone, hands tucked behind his head, and looked out. "The world's a big place, Jamie. You can, literally, spend lifetimes exploring it and still not manage to see it all."

His kebab finished, Jamie lay down on the stone with Jack. He imitated his posture, putting his hands behind his head. The gesture made the corners of Jack's mouth tweak up.

"_You _might get to see it all," Jamie pointed out.

"If I live long enough to. Depends on how long people believe."

"What happens if they all stop?"

Jack glanced over to Jamie. "I fade away. Now that I'm a Guardian, that's the price we pay. We become strong from all the belief, so that we can protect the kids like we do, but if it goes away, so do we. That's why it was so important that you still believed in us when we were fighting Pitch."

Jamie's eyebrows furrowed up. "I don't like that."

"Well, you can take it up with whoever decided the metaphysical laws of our universe there, buddy."

"Well, it's just, that means you'll be okay as long as I'm alive, but I'm not sure I have faith in the future generations of the world to understand the importance of believing in things like Santa. You should see the kindergarteners these days, they have no respect at all."

Jack burst out laughing. "You know, about half the time I talk to you, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not."

"I'm getting really good at it. I told mom I'm practicing for when I'm a teenager," Jamie said earnestly. "I'm serious, though. I don't like that I can't be sure you'll be here when I'm gone."

"Well, for one thing, let's not talk about when you'll be gone because I want to pretend that's just never going to happen. For another, you probably won't even believe in me when you're a grown up." Jack shrugged. "That just doesn't happen, Jamie. People always stop believing, eventually."

"I won't."

Jack side-eyed him.

"Jack, you've been taking me around the world. I'm watching the sun rise over the pyramids at Giza. This isn't exactly something I can convince myself that my parents were doing all along."

Jamie sat up and scooted closer to Jack, lying down again at his side.

"You've looked out for me and you're the funnest person I've ever met and you show me all different cool stuff," he said, leaning his head against Jack's shoulder. "As far as friendship goes, I'm in it for the long haul."

Jack looked down at him. "I don't remember them making kids so adorable back in the day," he said, reaching over to tickle Jamie's side. Jamie laughed, batting Jack's hands away. "Is that a new thing? When did they start improving the design? I hope you aren't just a fad like Furbies."

"No, stop! Ahahaha! No fair! If I try to tickle you, I'll probably get frostbite."

Jack stopped and sat up, looking at Jamie with narrowed eyes. "You're shivering."

"That's just because your hands are cold."

"That's because the desert is cold at night and you're not wearing a heavy enough jacket. I was only tickling you for two seconds." Jack stood up and grabbed his staff. "I'm gonna get you home before you get sick. It's late anyway."

"Awww, come on, can't we go to one more place?"

"Nope. You have school tomorrow."

"You could cancel it," Jamie suggested hopefully, raising his eyebrows.

"If I do it in the northern hemisphere at this time of year, Bunny will blow a blood vessel. C'mon, time to go."

He gripped Jamie firmly, hoisting him so that Jamie could keep his arms around Jack's neck as they flew. He took to the air over the desert, heading higher and higher so they could start traveling on the wind. Jack was so focused on heading up that he wasn't really focusing on what was off to the side, which was why Jamie noticed the strange shapes in the distance first.

"Hey, Jack?" he said, looking off into the desert. "What's that?"

Jack looked down, still floating upwards. "What?"

"That. See it?"

"Whoa…"

Dark clouds massed in the distance, columns of white stretching from them to the ground. There had to be at least ten of them, sweeping in dizzying paths around each other.

"Dust devils, maybe?" White clouds followed the columns. "Sand storm? Man, that's moving fast."

Jamie clung to Jack, his arms tightening around his neck. "Jack, can we go home now?"

"Yeah, let's, uh, let's try to avoid that." Jack looked upward. "Hey, Wind, can you give us a lift?"

He waited for the wind to draw them up, but it didn't. The air around them quickened, but the stray winds blew at them from the approaching storm, not the familiar lift of his old friend.

"Wind, come on, buddy, I need a ride!"

Nothing.

"Jack?" Jamie said, gaze fixed on the approaching wall of white.

"Wind! Come on! We need to get out of here!"

Nothing. Jack stared at the sky with something akin to horror on his face. "The wind's not listening to me. It's never – it's never _done_ that before."

"Jack, it's coming really fast now," Jamie said, pointing. Jack looked and saw that he was right. The storm was fast approaching, faster than a storm should have been able to move.

And the wind that came off it was cold, far too cold for the desert.

"I don't think that's sand," Jamie added.

To Jack's amazement, the next gust of wind carried a few stray flakes of snow.

"Snow in the desert?" Jack said, in disbelief. "_What_ is going on?"

He turned and flew towards Giza.

"Where are we going?" asked Jamie.

"Back to Giza. It's moving too fast. If the wind's not listening to me, I don't know if I can outfly it and we might get caught out in the open if I try to fly us over the desert. We need to take cover until it passes."

But the storm was gaining rapidly, the wind picking up, affecting Jack's flight. As the storm got closer, he understood why. Those columns weren't mere dust devils, they were full-on tornadoes – and they were carrying snow.

The snow tornadoes ripped closer, and suddenly, the wind was sucking them in. Jack fought against the pull but although his magic would have given him the leverage he needed on his own to slip away, that same magic was not as strong on Jamie.

The tornadoes were stronger.

The hood on Jamie's coat ripped off, and the boy was sucked from Jack's fingers into the vacuum of the tornadoes.

It was the sharpest knife of fear Jack had ever felt, jammed up right between his ribs into his heart. He shot into the heart of the tornadoes, missile-fast towards the half-falling, half-flying boy. Jamie's scream of terror wove in and out of the roar of the winds, and Jack strained with every inch of his arm, reaching for the ragged edge of Jamie's coat.

He grasped it as Jamie was nearly swallowed by a raging whirlwind. Jack whipped his staff around, catching the very momentum of the tornado that was sucking them in and riding it out of the maelstrom and into the open air. The storm plowed towards Giza as he and Jamie soared over the desert. Jamie, trembling in Jack's arms, moaned a frightened animal sound.

"Wow," said Jack, trying for lighthearted and mostly failing. "What a rush, huh Jamie? How you doing, buddy?"

"I'm f-f-freezing," said Jamie. Jack realized with alarm that he was more correct than he'd meant. The weather was much too harsh, and Jamie was much too mortal to be out in it.

"I think it's hot cocoa time for you," Jack joked, hefting Jamie into his arms again. "Save some marshmallows for me, will ya?"

He took off over the desert, not giving Jamie time to answer. Eventually he was able to use the trade winds for a boost, though it was much slower going without the Wind actively helping him. The trades carried them over the whitecapped Atlantic, but Jamie was still shaking – whether from nerves or cold – as they arrived at the Eastern seaboard. Jack dropped down towards land somewhere over Georgia, but his relief was short-lived. Another storm was coming to meet them.

A massive stormfront was dropping snow on Atlanta. Not only was Lake Allatoona frozen (again), it was frozen completely solid. They flew over snow piled on that should have been too warm from a day of balmy spring sunshine to keep the drifts frozen. The roads below were shiny with ice from snow that had melted and refrozen, but even the gleam of the ice was starting to disappear beneath a layer of freshly fallen, un-melting powder. The Atlanta traffic, always terrible, was backed up to every edge of the city – the many car crashes, smoking at various points along the icy roads, were clearly the cause.

Jamie shuddered with cold and Jack pulled the boy close on instinct, even though he knew it'd do little to help. "Almost there, kiddo," Jack said gently, as the southeastern US rolled beneath them, covered with deep and unseasonal snowdrifts.

The stormfront broke as they crossed into Virginia, making the going a little easier up into the northern states. Jamie's lips were blue and chattering when they reached his window, and Jack thrust him into his room, immediately grabbing a blanket to wrap around the younger boy.

"J-j-jack, what's g-going on?" Jamie asked, through chattering teeth, clutching the blanket around himself.

"I don't know," Jack admitted. At Jamie's worried expression, he added, "Yet."

Jamie's eyes widened as he looked at something behind Jack, and Jack turned to see the aurora borealis flashing across the stars, through the window.

Jack turned back to Jamie. "Get your winter coat out and watch the weather channel. Try to avoid doing anything that could get you stuck out in the cold." As Jamie nodded, his expression still worried, Jack said, "Don't worry. The other Guardians and I will figure this out. You just stay warm and keep an eye on things around here, okay?"

Jamie nodded again, huddling deeper under his blanket, and Jack leaped from his window directly onto the northerly wind, speeding as fast towards the pole as it would take him.

* * *

The elephants at the Memphis zoo swayed with anxiety, huddling around the space heaters set up in their enclosure. Zookeepers in puffy jackets scrambled to secure tarps to keep the warmth in, working against powerful winds that ripped the tarps from their hands. One finally tore out of its bonds entirely and went flying away in the biting wind.

In the zoo's gift shop, a frustrated docent and a harried fourth-grade teacher did their best to break the news gently to the shivering kids that their field trip was cut short. The weather was just too bad for the animals - or the children - to be out.

"Will the cold hurt the animals?" asked a dark-skinned girl in a panda bear hoodie. The docent and the teacher exchanged glances that, she thought, said it already had.

"The zookeepers are working hard to make sure all the animals have warm and safe shelters to stay in," said the docent. "Some of the warm-weather creatures are a little chilly right now, but the zoo has ways to keep them all toasty when Jack Frost is being a little brutal."

The panda-hoodied girl looked at her friends, their eyes all shining with disbelief.

"Why would Jack Frost want to hurt the animals?" one of them wondered out loud. Outside, the wind raged around the building, whistling through the trees with a sound oddly - and frighteningly - close to laughter.

The glass in the windows of the shop suddenly cracked as frost spider-webbed over it in a clawlike design. The children scrambled away from the noise and the impossibly cold draft that had flash-broken the window, yelping as the chilly air nipped at their noses.

Outside, the frost spread like a plague, snapping lines that fed electricity into the heaters warming the bird gardens and the ape habitats. Zookeepers raced to start backup generators, but stopped short in horror as they found the machines coated by thick layers of ice, barring them from starting the generators up. The sound that was almost like laughter grew louder, as the wind and the ice grew stronger with it.

Far to the north, nearly at the pole, Jack's stomach churned and a chill ran up his spine in ways it hadn't since he was alive.

For the first time, he understood what North meant when he said he could feel, in his belly, that something was wrong.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** Just a note, because we've gotten some reviews for stories in this series pointing out how some details are wrong as compared to the books, but Anders/Kate, Kaylin, and I (Saphie/Kira) wanted to let you know not to expect these stories to be 100% accurate to book canon. We feel the movie is more of an adaptation, as certain details from the movies and the official pre-movie comic don't match up to the books entirely. We definitely are going to play around with book canon a little bit and use some of it but it's not going to be all of it and things might be flipped around in unexpected ways.

We just wanted to let you know that's why some things will be similar to it but why others might be entirely divergent and based more on what would make the most sense with the movie.

P.S. We plan to feast on your tears of distress at the end of this chapter. We're going to have a late-night tipple of your tears in little scotch glasses. Fair warning. NO REGRETS.

* * *

**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders and Saph

* * *

**Chapter 4**

The yetis let Jack into the usual skylight entrance at the Pole. Sandy had beat him there by a few minutes and was landing as he entered, but Tooth, Bunny, and of course, North, were already there. He saw to his alarm that Bunny and Tooth were dusting snow and ice off of themselves, so clearly he hadn't been the only one to run into horrible weather. The snow was so cold that it had frozen in clumps to their fur and feathers, and they were having trouble dislodging it.

As he landed, Bunny saw him, and to Jack's surprise, darted immediately and aggressively into his personal space. North grabbed Bunny by the shoulder. "Hold o -"

"What is _wrong _with you?" Bunny shouted, shaking North's grip off. "What part of 'too much winter kills people' don't you understand? If you don't put a stop to this right now - "

Something sharp and ugly twisted in Jack's gut. His mouth dropped open in indignation. "You actually think I'd do this? That I'd hurt people just to – to have all this winter going? What's wrong with _you?_

How could Bunny think he'd do this? How _dare _he think he'd do this? What had happened to the Bunny at the Tooth Palace, who at least thought Jack was a good person even when they weren't getting along

"This isn't a game anymore!" Bunny's fury had not abated, and neither had his panic. "People are dying! _Have_ died! Do you _know _how many hospitals are running on generators? How many aren't running at all? How do you excuse that?"

"I didn't. Do it," Jack insisted, barely able to swallow his anger. He pointed to the rest of the Guardians, standing at the edge of their tiff with similar expressions of worry and astonishment. "And look at that! It seems you're the only one who thinks I _would_."

"You're the only winter spirit with this kind of power," Bunny insisted. "So tell me - if you didn't do it, who did?"

"Enough!" North pulled them apart. Bunny shook North's grip off immediately but North stayed angrily in his space. North's eyebrows were furrowed in an expression of such severity that Jack was almost shocked to see it. He'd never seen North genuinely angry, let alone angry at Bunny. "You need proof Jack is not fool enough or cold enough to murder, is easy enough to get."

He snapped his fingers. The elves scurried forward with a round object covered by a cloth embroidered with a Christmas tree. North whipped the cover off, revealing a black globe about the size of a beach ball, and pressed a pattern on the sphere's surface.

"I use this to monitor news and weather when flying sleigh on Christmas Eve. Helps with avoiding the storms and, how you say, anti-aircraft missiles in no-fly zones."

An image bloomed in the globe. A human weatherman was delivering live coverage of the storms, looking very close to frantic as he pointed out massive storm systems spreading across all of Asia. North pressed more patterns on the globe and several other meteorologists appeared from across the globe, all reporting with frightened expressions the freak snowstorms spreading across the world.

"There you have it," said North, looking up from the globe at Bunny. "If Jack was one making the madness, how could madness continue, when he is here?"

Jack looked triumphantly at Bunny, but Bunny wasn't even paying attention to Jack. He was staring at the dark globe with an expression of horror the likes of which Jack had never seen on the rabbit's face - not when facing the grootslang, not mid-battle with Pitch, not even on one of North's wild sleigh rides.

"But - he's the only one," he said, pointing at Jack, but his voice was suddenly trembling with something softer than anger. "He's the only possible -"

He looked at Jack, almost desperately.

Jack's triumph faded quickly as the hurt settled in, acidic, like it was scouring his insides. His anger boiled to a head and he balled his fist, jerking almost instinctively to hit Bunny. He managed to stop himself before raising his fist, but Bunny started at the gesture, correctly reading its sentiment and taking a step back.

Jack stood there, shaking, one fist clenched at his side, the other holding his staff so tight that his knuckles were bone-white. He pressed his lips together just as he had when Bunny had rubbed in the fact that no one could see him, the day Jack had been dragged to the Pole and told – only by the others rather then the Moon – that he was a Guardian.

All of Bunny's criticism until now was a papercut compared to this. It was nothing compared to the knowledge that no matter how much good will he displayed, no matter how clear he made it that he cared more about the lives of the children of the world than he cared for his own – it would never be enough to make Bunny see him for what he was, instead of whatever it was Bunny saw every time he looked at Jack.

Well. That brought them full circle, didn't it? Back to that late snow day in North America, when Jack, new to the world, hadn't understood, and hadn't expected to ever meet, Bunny's irrational standards.

Fine. He didn't care.

And just like that, in more than just a defiant thought, he actually _didn't_ care.

His shaking stopped, his eyes stopped watering, and something inside him, some little string that had been pulled taut all this time, snapped. The anger flowed away, and Jack felt an unfamiliar coldness replace it in his heart.

Bunny was looking at him, eyes wide, but Jack turned away from him, to North.

"Well now that we know I'm _not _doing it, maybe we should figure out who _is_."

"Strong activity building over Colorado. We will take the sleigh," North declared, no hint of a concession in his voice as he plowed past Bunny and through the workshop. "Is good for an aerial view and for no chance of losing each other. Hurry!"

Jack expected Bunny to put up a protest, but he loped after North in positively meek silence.

The rush for the sleigh was subdued. North wasn't smiling, and Jack wasn't totally sure it was just because of his and Bunny's fight. Sandy and Tooth wore similar expressions of concern, and maybe a little fear, but they didn't walk in silence for long, dropping back to close in on Bunny. Tooth's voice was too hushed for Jack to hear, but it sounded equal parts angry and astonished. Jack glanced back and saw Sandy's dreamsand pictograms working overtime over his head. Tiny, fluffy images of multiple versions of Bunny in his tiny form kept reappearing, but the rest of the images flashed along at such a speed that Jack couldn't make sense of them.

"- nothing rational about that and you know it. Have you been _waiting_ for –" Jack caught Tooth saying, when her voice briefly rose just enough for him to hear, before dropping back down to a register only audible to rabbit ears.

Jack looked back to the path before him with a little bit of relief. At least the others didn't suspect him.

But they were all deeply worried about something other than an in-team blowup, and that was alarming. The ice tornadoes in Giza and the blizzard over Atlanta hadn't been a joke, but neither had the crisis at the Tooth palace, and North had jollied his way through that (at least at the start). Whatever this was, it wasn't just big, it was possibly something the older Guardians knew something about that he did not.

He spoke to North's back. "So...what is everyone worried about that I'm not up to speed on?"

They emerged into the sleigh's launch cavern, where the yetis were working double time to check the sleigh over. Each Guardian jumped in the sleigh without hesitation, even Bunny.

"When there is more to go on than suspicion, then maybe we should say," North said. He cracked the reigns without an enthusiastic "YAHH" but the reindeer took off at their usual breakneck speed, whipping the sleigh through the ice tunnel and out into the open air. North readied his snowglobe to throw as Jack heard his name spoken.

"Jack."

Jack looked up. Bunny was gripping the edge of the sleigh tight, his nails digging into the wood, already looking green around the gills from the ride.

"I'm sorry," he said. He sounded so sincere that for a moment, Jack's sting at being accused softened. "When I saw the storms, I thought -"

That someone who'd lay down his life for Jamie, for Sophie, for the rest of the children, would have created them? That someone that convinced Jamie to believe in Bunny before he faded away would hurt people?

Jack's voice wasn't angry as he spoke. It was like he couldn't even muster anger up anymore, and his voice was only quiet - and cold. "You thought the worst of me. I'm just going to assume you always will." He inhaled, a last little flare of anger dissipating in the coldness of his heart. "No problem. We don't have to like each other to work together. I don't feel any need to force it when I don't want to be your friend anyway."

Bunny was silent, leaning on the side of the sleigh and looking away from Jack as they flew into the pull of North's portal. They emerged with blinding sunlight behind them, glaring on a massive tower of thundering black clouds, pouring snow on an already frozen range of mountains.

Something was zipping down one of the mountains, cutting a track across the fresh mountain snow in their direction. The figure sparkled in the sunlight like it was covered in - or made of - snow.

"Hey!" Jack stood, pointing at the figure. "North, take us down."

North glanced over the edge of the sleigh. "Is friend of yours?"

"Yeah. Well. Sort of," said Jack. "He's coming from the storm, so maybe he saw something the human news crews didn't."

North jerked the reins, pulling the reindeer in a sharp turn. The sleigh descended quickly to the mountainside, where the lone snowboarder slid the rest of the way to them, the sun gleaming off the ice of his board and the snow that made his body. Frosty the Snowman cut to a stop, kicking up a spray of snow that flew over the sleigh.

"Oh man, am I glad to see you guys!" The normally calm, smiling, human-shaped collection of button-nosed, coal-eyed snow was as close to panic as Jack had ever seen him. He adjusted his magic hat, which was slightly askew. "You gotta get up the slopes and do your Guardian thing like pronto, man. There are kids back there and I don't know how much longer the lodge is gonna have power."

"Okay, Frosty, calm down," Jack said, stepping forward as North drew up beside him. "What's going on back there?

Frosty the Snowman was one of those rare few myths who'd been born of belief alone, made new out of nothing but a story, and he'd been born only a few decades ago. Jack had always found him friendly enough, but forming any kind of bond with someone with such a shallow affect was pretty much impossible. It was as if, in his newness and lack of an old life, Frosty didn't really have a personality so much as a collection of quirky traits and mannerisms that were hard to have a solid friendship with. You couldn't talk to the guy – anytime Jack had tried to talk to him about something more serious than snowboarding, Frosty's reaction had been along the lines of "dudebro, you're bummin' me out; lay down some fresh pow-pow and let's hit it."

Which was the other problem – Jack was fairly sure Frosty liked him more for his ability to make it snow than for anything else. The few times they'd hung out, it'd left the frost spirit feeling a little used, like the neighborhood kid that everyone was friends with only so they'd get to play on their trampoline.

Still, Frosty wasn't a bad guy overall, and he was always good with the kids. He grinned at Jack, obvious relief spreading across his coal features.

"Jack, bro." He offered Jack a hand, which Jack slapped companionably. "It's so beige this is how we run into each other again, but I am glad to see you. Could not be more of a relief to have the Guardians here. It was whack, man, the storm just came out of nowhere. It was a totally nectar day! Me and the kids were shreddin' the gnar when all of a sudden this wicked blizzard just dumps on us and this blue hoedad is flying around, laughing all crazy -"

"Wait, you saw someone? Who was it?" Jack interjected, as Tooth asked, "Are the kids alright?"

Frosty nodded. "Yeah, I got 'em back to the lodge, but then I bailed." He shook his head at himself. "I feel like such a muppet but you should have seen the storm – hail the size of softballs, wind like – like a sharp thing, I don't even know. This Old Man Winter guy, he's one gnarly piece of work. Bad gnarly," Frosty clarified, "Not good gnarly. I'm just one snowman, man, I didn't stand a chance."

"You are certain is Old Man Winter?" North stepped closer to Frosty, utter seriousness in his twinkling eyes.

Frosty nodded, equally serious. "Yeah man, he was shouting it all over the - " Frosty suddenly looked past Jack, concerned. "Uh, is he okay?"

Jack glanced over his shoulder to where Bunny was leaning against the sleigh, tossing his carrots into a snowbank.

Jack snorted as Tooth zipped to Bunny's side, feeling a harsh barb of amusement at Bunny's discomfort. "Not _everyone_ loves the sleigh."

"Look," Frosty went on, clearly gathering his resolve – "I'm not much compared to a Guardian, but if you guys are going in, I'll go in with you. Those kids are real crispy little bros. If there's anything I can do to help them, man, I might not be much, but at least I can help you guys out, right?"

Jack glanced at the others. Tooth was busy patting Bunny on the shoulder, Bunny was busy…not paying attention, and Sandy and North returned his glance with simultaneous nods. Jack turned back to Frosty. "Welcome to the team, in that case. Sounds like we're gonna need all the help we can get."

"Everyone, back in the sleigh," North said. "Mountain will not climb itself. Bunny -"

"I'm all right," Bunny said, in a trembling voice that said he was not, in fact, all right, as he climbed back into the sleigh. North paused just a moment, and Jack thought about throwing out a teasing line - something about how North was clearly worried Bunny was going to ruin the finish on the wooden seating. But frankly, he was still too angry to joke with Bunny at all, even at his expense, when such a golden opportunity presented itself. He stayed silent, Bunny gripped the side of the sleigh like he was trying to strangle it, and North cracked the reigns sharply.

They charged into the storm, the black clouds roiling and whipping snow at them like it was personal. The snow was so cold that the flakes landed like shards of flying ice. Jack couldn't remember ever feeling snowflakes that hurt, but even he felt the sting as they tore at his cheeks.

The very wind felt malicious – almost as if it was laughing in his ears at his pain.

No – that was definitely laughter he was hearing, deranged, full-bodied laughter, rising over the scream of the wind. The laughter grew louder as they flew deep into the heart of the storm, until it seemed to fly at them from every direction. Visibility dropped to a hundred feet in any direction. The reindeer were slowing, confusion making them falter in their flight.

North read the instruments on his sleigh with intense concentration, now that they were his only means of avoiding driving the reindeer directly into a mountain. The rest of the Guardians (and Frosty) stood tense in the bed of the sleigh, staring into the whiteout with silent, shivering vigilance. Tooth and Sandy kept glancing at each other, their faces written with concern. Bunny had already drawn his boomerangs.

But it was Jack who saw him first – a shadow barely visible at first through the blinding snow, flying with jerky, awkward motions, like a bird trying to carry prey too heavy for it off the ground. Something in the sight of the shadow chilled Jack, as he had never been chilled before, down to his very soul.

"Guys!"

The Guardians (and Frosty) turned, just as the shadow vanished into the white again.

Suddenly the laughter seemed to come from right beside the sleigh, then from a distance, then close again – whipping around like the wind, higher, more frantic. The blizzard blew with greater intensity, and the last of the visibility was wiped away. The reindeer snorted with panic in their harnesses, jerking the sleigh wildly.

"Am taking her down!" North shouted. "Even the instruments – look, they are unsteady."

The sleigh couldn't take the conditions. _Santa's sleigh_ couldn't take the conditions. If Jack hadn't already been chilled, that would have chilled him more.

The sleigh landed hard and the Guardians leaped out, those who hadn't already drawn their weapons drawing them. The laughter boomed in the snow around them like thunder, resolving into a voice like ice grinding rock down.

"Well, well, well! If it isn't my _old friends,_ the Guardians! Oh, but you probably don't remember little old me, do you? Can't think whoooooo could be causing all this _lovely_ destruction? Well don't worry, you'll remember once –"

"We know it's you, Old Man Winter!" Bunny shouted. "You're not keeping anyone on the edge of their seat."

A figure was suddenly _there_ without warning, a haggard, bent shadow walking on the crust of the snow. "What? Who told you?"

Old Man Winter walked into view. His ragged cloak was threadbare and rotten, held together only by the icicles that dripped from his body. His hands shook, and his back was bent like an old man's. He looked half-rotten himself, as if the cold had eaten away parts of his body. His skin was the mottled blue of a frozen corpse, his nose broken away, leaving only a blackened stump on his face. His eyes stared out through deep-shadowed holes in his icy, wrinkled face, glittering like shards of ice.

With a horrified start, Jack recognized those eyes. They were the same pale, grey eyes that had pierced him with such hatred in his nightmare at the Tooth Palace. The memory rushed back to him suddenly, drawing the steadiness from his hands.

"I mean it," Old Man Winter continued, gesturing vaguely with his clawlike hand. His nails had grown long and sharp from fingertips blackened with frostbite. "Who gave up the goodies?" He fixed his eyes on Frosty. "Was it that guy?"

Frosty, trembling, said nothing and sidled slightly behind North, clearly regretting his attempt at heroism.

"Oh, well that's...that's disappointing. That really takes the wind out of my sails..." Old Man Winter trailed off, sagging, disappointment pulling his wrinkled features farther downward. "I had a speech and everything."

The Guardians all exchanged glances before resuming their battle-ready stances.

"Call this off now," North demanded, brandishing his swords. "You have been asleep for too long, Old Man Winter. We will let you return to your slumber – is only mercy we have to give you."

Old Man Winter groaned. "Ugh. I know. Feelin' kinda groggy - I mean, how long was I out for? One, two thousand years? You ever take a nap, but then you nap way longer than you meant to, so when you wake up it's like – 'well I slept a whole eon away, might as well just make a full millennia of it?'"

"Couldn't've come up with a better plan myself," Bunny growled.

Old Man Winter's expression suddenly shifted, a huge smile cutting his wrinkled face nearly in half, revealing the stubs of his broken teeth. His eyes fell on Jack and Jack tightened his grip on his staff, his spine still tingling with the memory of his nightmare.

"Wow, I really have been sleeping too long. You guys even got yourselves a brand new Guardian." But he looked past Jack, still grinning...at Bunny? "Who are _you_ supposed to be, the Easter Bunny?"

Bunny launched a boomerang at Old Man Winter with an angry shout. Old Man Winter raised one hand and an ice sculpture erupted out of the snow in front of him, knocking the boomerang away with a jagged, glittering hand. The force of the boomerang still cracked the arm and lopped it off, but another ice sculpture jutted out of the ground behind it, and Old Man Winter faded into the white haze. More statues erupted out of the ground, strange, vaguely human shapes with expression-less faces and hollow holes for eyes. In moments the Guardians were completely surrounded, the ice sculptures both barrier and foe.

With a shout, the Guardians threw themselves into battle. The ice sculptures could only move in short jerks, but those bursts were lightning quick and every inch of their surface was covered with sharp, jagged ice. The sculptures fell quickly, whether it was to sword, boomerang, wing, or sand, but each one was replaced just as quickly.

"We are so krunked, man," Frosty moaned, but even he fought and he did fight well. He zoomed across the snow on his ice board, 360-ing through the heads of the killer ice statues, his board both a shield and a blunt weapon.

Jack turned his staff on the first statue he saw, blasting it to freeze it to the ground.

For a moment, that stopped it – then the statue absorbed the new ice, broke free from the ground, and continued marching along, even bigger than before.

"Uh, slight problem, guys!" Jack said, backing away in the air – and barely managed to duck in time as the ice sculpture behind him swung a blow meant to knock his head off. He smashed the sculpture's head with his staff, and it crumbled. "Ice powers! Ice powers against ice!"

"Can you not take them apart? Or control them?" North asked as he slashed through a statue's head. "Make them work for you!"

Jack tried to exert his power on the ice, but absolutely nothing happened. He couldn't even influence the snowflakes whipping around him. "Not working!"

"Then smash with staff," North advised, "and keep close!"

"Of course they won't obey you, boy." Old Man Winter's voice creaked out of the snowy fog around them. "You aren't the _real_ spirit of winter. You're a fake. You're just a scab, a poor man's version. A knockoff! A dime a dozen! I could go on."

He dropped suddenly out of the air just as Frosty smashed through another sculpture, tackling the snowman right off his board.

"Oh, and what do we have here? A fragile greenhorn, all _cool tricks _and _dag moves my dudebro _when there's nobody around to impress but a bunch of dumb kids? How're the big leagues treatin' ya, rookie?" Old Man Winter leered his rotten grin as Frosty struggled in the old man's armlock.

The Guardians froze, weapons in hand. The snowman moaned in mortal terror, struggling in Old Man Winter's headlock. "Oh man, oh man, this is _not_ cash –"

"Let the snowman go," Jack said, stepping forward, but stopping as Old Man Winter held his clawlike hand threateningly over the snowman's chest. Frosty shuddered with horror.

"Ah-ah-ah, one more step and the snowman bites the pow-pow," Old Man Winter admonished. "Why do you care? Is he one of yours?"

"He's one of his own," said Jack, gritting his teeth, straining not to move as Old Man Winter flexed his claws closer to Frosty's chest. He could practically feel the others tensing the same around him. Frosty maybe wasn't the deepest myth on the mountain, but he didn't deserve whatever Old Man Winter had planned.

"Oh come on. This guy's such a ninny. But I bet I could whip him into shape."

"I'll never join you, you beige hoedad!" Frosty shouted. "You are the un-crispiest un-bro!"

"Please, like I was giving you a choice," scoffed Old Man Winter, and he plunged his claws into Frosty's chest.

"No!" Jack cried out.

Frosty howled as Old Man Winter dug his hand in deep, yanking something from the snowman's chest. The Guardians surged forward, but they were too late to prevent Old Man Winter opening his mouth wide and swallowing Frosty the Snowman's heart whole.

Frosty's body sagged into loose snow, drifting away on the wind. His last words drifted to them on the wind as his button eyes fell to rest on the snow below –

"This is – so – beige..."

Old Man Winter vanished on a gust of wind, blown away like a crow feather out of the Guardians' reach.

"Neat trick, huh?" His voice came from behind them. They whipped around, spotting him on a ridge above them, his eyes gleaming with more malice. "Wanna see another one?"

The snow around them suddenly exploded, but not with the barely-mobile ice sculptures. It coalesced into snow figures, many of them, with black, soulless eyes and mouths that dripped with knifelike icicle teeth.

Jack let out an involuntary yelp of disgust and horror as he was surrounded by zombie Frosties.

"Yeah, and I ate the Snow Queen's heart too. I can't _wait_ to show you what tricks _that_ broad had up her sleeve."

The snowmen launched their attack. The Guardians threw themselves into the fight again, felling snowmen left and right, but where the ice sculptures had been numerous but slow, the snowmen took longer to form, but were fast and agile. The battle raged as Old Man Winter's laughter echoed at them from high places.

"I think it's safe to say, no more napping for me. Not when there's so much left to be frozen. What can I say? I'm a go-getter."

A roar filled their ears, a noise like a train that shook the mountain. The snowmen grinned evil grins as the Guardians faltered in their fighting, distracted by the noise.

"Avalanche!" North shouted – because after all, there was no harm in shouting about an avalanche when it had already begun. "Is heading right toward us!"

"Not toward us!" Bunny shouted back, his ears twitching in the wind as he strained to judge the avalanche's direction. "The –"

But whatever it was headed for had to be important, because Bunny took off before he finished his sentence, streaking past the snowmen at full-out rabbit speed to disappear into the whiteout.

"The lodge," Tooth whispered, drawing the only possible conclusion.

"The children!" North gasped, as the roar of the avalanche raged on – away from them – on the far side of the mountain. "Everyone! Back to the sleigh!"

Even despite the horrible flying conditions, they still had to try to get there to help.

But the command only caused the snowmen to focus their attack on North. Tooth and Sandy took to the air and Jack raised his staff to join them, but instead of lifting him up, the wind beat him down with a crushing blow. A snowman's knee landed hard on his chest.

Jack gasped, the air knocked out of him, but the snowman had only moments to leer above him before it exploded, cut to fragments by Tooth's razor sharp wings. She helped him back to his feet, but the wind blew him out of her hands when she tried to lift him into the air, and it was obvious that she was struggling to stay airborne. The ice sculptures grew steadily around them, a forest of jagged glassy ice separating Jack and North from the sleigh. Sandy's dreamsand glowed softly in the whiteout as the Guardians stood at each others' backs, and he lifted his hands to summon a dreamsand cloud large enough to carry them all.

The snowmen saw his plans and focused their attack on him, the ice sculptures taking up the battle with Jack, North, and Tooth. The three Guardians fought, not just for their lives, but to clear a path to Sandy, but without a fifth Guardian, the deck was stacked even higher against them.

The only thing they had on their side was that by now, the Guardians were a seasoned team capable of cooperation in the extreme. North blazed forward in the lead, slicing and shattered snowmen and statues, a whirling cyclone of color and movement. Behind him, Sandy tossed snowmen and statues up into the air with his sandwhips so that Tooth could fly by and slice and shatter them with her wings. All the while a cloud of dreamsand was gathering beneath his feet. Jack brought up the rear, smashing the statues and snowmen as they started to reform, covering Sandy from behind as their getaway cloud coalesced beneath him.

Because of his position at the rear, Jack was in a unique position to see Old Man Winter appear out of the haze behind them. The old man hefted an ice spear to throw, his gaze focused on Sandy, and Jack couldn't stop the gasp that erupted from his lungs at the thought of history repeating itself. Old Man Winter took an aim that was steadier than Jack had thought his shaking hands were capable of, and threw the spear with more force than Jack thought a man so old would be able to summon. Jack shot into the air and swung his staff wide, smashing the spear to pieces before it could finish its arc. The wind forced him back to the ground, and he landed hard.

"Guys, watch out, he's sniping from behind!" he called to the others, but the shrieking noise of the wild snowstorm carried his voice away. They didn't look back, distracted by battle.

When he looked back, Old Man Winter had vanished into the haze again, but Jack spotted him when he emerged to their left, aiming another spear at North's back.

He blasted Old Man Winter with such force that the spear flew out of his hands, landing harmlessly in the distant snow. Now the real onslaught began, Old Man Winter appearing and disappearing, spear in hand each time to throw at them. Jack had his hands full knocking each one out of his grip or smashing them mid-flight. It was during a jump to smash one out of the air that he found himself at the mercy of the wind to a nearly deadly extreme. It suddenly bore down on him, blowing him down towards a rocky outcropping on the ground with such force that he knew he'd get skewered or crushed if he landed straight on it. At the last minute he wrenched control of his flight away from the wind and landed to the side, unskewerd, but slamming into the packed snow painfully.

As he struggled to his feet, trying to get his bearings, a snowman suddenly grew up from the snow around his staff, ripping it out of his slackened grip.

"Aaah, no!" Jack lunged for it, but the snowman stood up at its full height, dancing away with the staff held high out of Jack's reach. More snowmen grew around him, along several ice sculptures, surrounding him with a sinister barrier of ice and snow. He could barely see or hear the others fighting in the whiteout, even though they weren't that far away. Only the dimmest glow from Sandy's dreamsand reached him.

As the horde of snow creatures advanced on him, he called out for help.

"North! North, Sandy, Tooth! Help!"

The wind whipped his thin voice away, and even though the Guardians weren't that far off, they may as well have been in an entirely different world.

"They can't hear you. The wind won't let them. _I_ won't let them."

Jack turned. Old Man Winter stood right behind him. The snowmen and ice sculptures closed rank, surrounding Jack completely in a ring of enemy ice and snow. The snowman that had stolen his staff handed it to the old man, who swung it around with interest. The way he twirled it made it look like he knew his way around a bo.

"You're going to pay for what you did to Frosty," Jack said.

"The dudebro? No. No, I'm not. Who cares about him anyway?"

"'Dudebro'? Where are you even getting this stuff if you've been sleeping for centuries?"

"Watched TV for a solid two weeks after I woke up. Wanted to catch up on the world."

"Where did you get a TV?" Jack asked. Despite the seriousness of the situation, he couldn't help but be amused.

"The thing about freezing a family to death is, they don't object much to you borrowing their stuff afterwards."

The amusement was gone. Jack's eyes went wide.

"Ah, finally you understand the seriousness of your situation. Good, good. I know it was you," Old Man Winter said. "You stole my name, stole my power, and put me to sleep all those years ago. Well you're not getting away with it any more, sonny Jim."

Jack frowned as Old Man Winter advanced on him a step, still twirling the staff like he'd been handling it for ages. "I have no idea who you are. The Guardians faced you before, but I've never heard of you in my life."

"Never heard of me? Never heard of me? That's funny! You're a funny guy. Come _on_. Jack Frost, Jokul Frosti? Tsk tsk, that's not homage, my boy, that's plagiarism." He kept advancing, pushing Jack closer and closer to the far edge of the ring of snowmen. He fixed his eyes on Jack again. "You tried to _replace_ me."

His glare was no less hateful than the one from Jack's nightmare.

"You stole so much of my belief I went to sleep where I stood, and you've been running rampant ever since, making a mockery of winter."

"Making a mockery of – what are you -"

"You made it fun! Fun!" Old Man Winter flailed apoplectically, swinging Jack's staff, absolutely furious. "Winter isn't supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be death! It's supposed to be bleakness personified! It's supposed to be the end of all things. Winter is supposed to bite and take and leech everything good away from the world. You took my belief – you even took my _name_ – and you _ruined_ it. And now you're going to pay the price. You took my belief. Now I'm going to take yours."

There was nothing for it. Jack lunged at Old Man Winter, grabbing at his staff, but the old man jerked it out of his reach and with a deft parry, smacked him in the elbow hard enough that the bone almost broke.

Jack cried out in pain, cradling the injured arm protectively.

"See?" Jokul Frosti's eyes glittered with amused malice. "_Pain._ Winter is supposed to cause pain."

Jack lunged again. Old Man Winter thwacked his other elbow in retaliation.

"Son, I was a Viking in my old life. I'd kill twenty boys like you before breakfast," he chuckled, "and that was on a slow day. But I'll tell you what – if you can get this staff out of my hands, I'll let you live. How does that sound?"

Jack lunged again, determined to get his staff back, but Jokul struck again. This time, it was a knee. Next, an ankle, and as Jack fell, a sharp blow to his solar plexus. Jack knelt in the snow, clutching his gut, trying to catch his breath. He was well out of his league. Without his staff, he was just a boy who was good at having fun. Old Man Winter, even on his own, was winter at its coldest and deadliest.

"Look at you. Pitiful, just pitiful. This is – this is almost too easy," Jokul said ruefully. "Can't you put up at least a little more of a fight? It's not even going to feel like a victory this way."

Jack shook his head, hand curled at his stomach. "I can't. I can't beat you head on."

So he rolled sideways and threw the hardened ball of ice he'd been discreetly forming in that curled hand at Old Man Winter's head. It struck, hitting him hard enough on the head to throw him off balance. Jack took advantage of the opening and went for his staff again, but Jokul simply used his own momentum from the blow to his head to spin around and swing the staff at Jack. Pain exploded in his head as the staff connected with his cheek. Jack flew into the air, spinning, and slid through the snow almost to the line of ice statues and snowmen.

"There we go, that's a little better! At least you've got some spunk, kid, I'll give you that."

Jack struggled to his feet, Jokul advancing on him. The doddering old man he'd seemed when they first began their fight clearly was not the whole measure of him. He held the staff in his corpselike, unshaking hand, his back straight, his chin up high, steady in his moment of exerting power over Jack – an imperious king of his element, a hardened warrior with a heart as cold as the dark side of the moon.

Jack shook with fear – and cold. The air around the old man was so cold even Jack could feel it. He stood, knowing he didn't stand a chance. He wouldn't be able to get his staff back. His only option was to try to break past the wall of minions and reach the others.

Jack turned and ran, but something – most likely his staff - snagged his hood and yanked him onto his back. He rolled over and tried to scramble to his feet again, but only met with more pain as Old Man Winter struck him on the face.

"Put him on his knees. The others will try to interfere if it takes any longer."

The ice statues grabbed and jerked Jack to his knees, holding him in place with icy vice grips. He struggled viciously, but a third moved behind him, jagged, icy hands clenching around his face, forcing him to look at Jokul Frosti.

"The other Guardians will –"

"Save you? Destroy me?" He laughed. "They could barely overpower me before. And now that I'm taking back the belief that was rightfully mine, they'll never be able to stop me."

Jack's eyes widened. "Taking back the –"

Jokul leaned in with a huge grin. "Can't you feel it? Then again, you've probably been a little too distracted to notice, what with your imminent death and all."

Jack's spirit sank as he took a moment to attend to his senses and realized that Old Man Winter was right. He could feel the kids out there, their belief and joy in his existence turning to fear and distrust. He felt them growing afraid of him, even hating him. All the believers he'd gained across the world were turning against him, doubting his goodwill, believing he'd hurt them.

There were millions of voices he could only just barely catch the edges of.

_"Mommy, why is it so cold? It's making my fingers hurt."_

_"Why is Jack Frost being so mean? All the elephants at the zoo died."_

_Why did Jack Frost have to make it so cold that Mr. Tibbles went to sleep? I hate him I hate him I hate him –" _

Tears began to run from Jack's eyes, along with the blood dripping from his split lip, both freezing on his skin in the cold. After three hundred years of being alone, he'd worked so hard to make them believe in him, and now, even worse than deciding they didn't, they were beginning to revile him. Just like he'd felt their belief and their joy, now their hatred coursed through him.

"What did you do?" he gasped, his voice hoarse with misery.

"A blizzard here, a shadow among the snowfall there, laughter like the laughter they're used to hearing when the snowstorms come. I had some help figuring out the right little touches."

Help? Jack wondered. What help?

"They're already starting to believe that we're one and the same," said Jokul. "That Jack Frost is the winter spirit that bites and freezes and brings death. There's only one last thing I need to cement my reign, Jack."

Old Man Winter looked at his chest and he already knew what that thing was before the Old Man said it.

"Your heart. Then you'll be a part of me, and instead of sharing the belief, it'll all be mine. Bit harder to take it from someone flesh and blood than it is from someone made of ice or snow, but luckily I picked up a little trick from the Snow Queen. She had something handy that helps with this sort of thing."

Jokul flicked his wrist like a magician doing a card trick. He suddenly held two large splinters of ice in his fingers.

"These would do the trick over time," he said, leering at the ice shards with far too much glee, "but lucky for you, I only want you to have these ones for a few minutes." He shook his head with sudden disgust. "You thought winter was fun. You thought the world was some happy place with snowballs and – and funtimes. Well, I got news for you, kid. The world's a dark place, dark and cold. And now?"

He flicked his wrist. Before Jack had a chance to cringe or close his eyes, the shards flew at his face and his world exploded in pain – and darkness.

"Now you get to see the world the way _I_ see it."

* * *

North did not want to admit it, but the fight was not going well. Tooth could barely get airborne in the wind, Bunny hadn't returned, the snow army was never-ending, and minions were dogpiling Sandy, preventing him from getting his sand cloud free and into the air.

And Jack - Jack was barely holding his own. The creatures were working the entire fight to separate Jack from the Guardians' aid, the only reason North knew he was alright was because Jack's long-limbed silhouette was within view in the whiteout, a few yards away. If not for the comforting sight of the boy swinging his staff and shattering other figures, North would have been panicking by now.

"Sandy, we have to be going now!"

Sandy gave him a slight eye roll and an incredulous look that said 'I'm trying here! Do you want to do this?' before narrowly evading another snowman's diving elbow drop.

Suddenly North saw the shadowy shape of an ice statue knock Jack to the ground. He struggled, falling too far behind. North surged back towards the boy, slicing through snowmen and sculptures.

"Jack, you are falling behind! They are trying to separate us –"

Now that he was closer, he realized something was wrong. Jack's form was a little off, his outline a little too sharp.

"Jack?" Now, close enough to see clearly, North's eyes went wide with horror.

The Jack-shaped snowman spun its ice staff, grinning icicle teeth at North. This whole time they'd thought Jack was just yards away in the snow, it had been an icy imposter. So if this wasn't Jack, then where was the real –

A scream carried over the wind, just barely, as if the wind were trying to keep the sound from them, but it was too high, too loud, to filled with agony, to be completely whipped away.

North let out a cry of rage, sliced the doppelganger's head clean off, and called to the others. "Old Man Winter has Jack! It was a trick! All of this, a distraction!"

The snowstorm, the avalanche, the minions - all a calculated move to get to the other winter spirit. It was a trap and they'd let Jack fall right into it. As North rushed through the snow, slicing his way through their enemies, he could only hope that Jack was still alive to be saved.

* * *

The world was a dark, cold place.

Well of course it was now. But for the moment, that's _all_ it was – all Jack knew, from touch, since he couldn't know anything from sight. He was blind.

Not snow-blind. Completely blinded.

He felt his blood dripping from his eyes, liquid only for the briefest moment before freezing on contact with the air. Icicles of blood hung from his cheekbones.

He screamed and then screamed again.

His own sobs pierced his heart as hard as his eyes had been pierced – no amount of screaming would bring his vision back, and yet he couldn't stop.

And yet – his vision _was _coming back.

Jack blinked, opened his eyes again – and wished he'd stayed blind.

Old Man Winter leered over him, somehow more hideous than he'd managed before.

"How about it, boy? How much fun does the snow look like now?"

Jack gasped a single sob. The bladelike edges of the snowflakes flashed at him in light that was somehow too dreary and too flashingly bright at the same time, shadows and glare mottling the air like sickness. As he blinked, the shards in his eyes dug deeper. He cried in pain, the icy agony cutting deep as he knelt helpless in the snow.

"It's too bad you're going to die seeing only enemies. I'm guessing none of us look _that _different." Jokul Frosti beamed, and Jack's sharded vision saw the malice in it and matched it to every look of malice he'd seen in his long life. And he _had_ seen so much malice –how had he never internalized it?

He'd brushed it under the rug – all the private cruelties he'd been witness to, all the acts of inhumanity that he had barely any power to counter, decades and decades of slow-changing hate – by distracting himself with fun. But even the source of his fun – even that hurt people. Killed them, even.

The world was like a poorly-built house that had taken three hundred years to crash down around him. The ice sculptures released him but Jack didn't get up to run away – he only fell, unsupported and agonized, into snow that was suddenly _cold _to him.

"But then, I imagine you've had time to make plenty of bad memories to dredge up."

Jack looked up. Jokul Frosti stood over him, his hand full of a second round of shards. "But as gratifying as this is, my boy, no one knows like I do – _all good things must end."_

Old Man Winter threw the shards.

Or he would have, if North had been a second longer to reach him.

North's battle cry became an agonized roar as Old Man Winter redirected his blow, stabbing his new enemy through the thick layers of his fur coat, but North's swords still rang on the ice spear Jokul Frosti summoned up as the two old warriors went head-to-head in battle. North fought one-armed, his sharded arm dangling, his only sword flashing fast enough for two.

He was a terrible creature, shouting for another's blood, his sword flashing like the claw of some unforgiving animal. There was no hint of jolliness, no shadow of compassion, to soften old Saint Nick.

How many people had died with this North as their last? Had – had all of them _most certainly _been bad enough to deserve it?

Jack knelt listlessly, watching the fight in a daze. He didn't even reach for his staff as the snowmen closed in around North and Old Man Winter, ice sculptures rising in an arenalike barrier behind them. Old Man Winter laughed, as if he were delighted to have found a worthy opponent – even a worthy opponent who was faltering.

Because North _was_ faltering – though his advances were swift and strong, pain was written on his face, and twice already his footing had been unsteady enough for Old Man Winter to nearly land a serious blow. The old Viking parried the Cossack's sword, striking at his feet, and North, unbelievably, _stumbled. _Jokul Frosti lifted his spear to strike.

North's death loomed like a shadow in Jack's horrific new vision, and he howled a warning that was surely too late.

His howl covered the _thwip_ of a boomerang whipping through the storm, careening with a force that cut the wind like a knife.

It struck Old Man Winter in the back of the head with a crack like thunder. Black, coagulated blood flew in globs and the boomerang cracked completely in half, falling to the snow in pieces. Old Man Winter stumbled, his laughter turning to a howl of rage and pain as blood bubbled from his skull. Snowmen surrounding him suddenly erupted into powder as Tooth cut through them, a blue and green blur of razor-sharp wings. Bunny leaped over an ice sculpture into the ring of snowmen, his only remaining boomerang flying in Tooth's assistance.

The snowmen fell in droves as Old Man Winter howled, distracted in confusion and pain. North raised his sword to deliver a killing blow – but Old Man Winter lunged with his spear, stabbing into North's good shoulder even in spite of his own injury.

Golden light suffused the scene as the Sandman swooped in on a golden cloud, striking out with a sand whip to knock Old Man Winter off his feet. Tooth and Bunny were at North's side in an instant, ferrying him onto the cloud as North hissed through gritted teeth. The ice sculptures began to close in as the sand cloud pulled up to Jack, just as Bunny darted over to pick up Jack's fallen staff.

"_NO!"_

Jack's ragged howl of rage ripped out of his throat and he threw himself at the staff before Bunny could touch it, rolling with the staff to smack the rabbit across the face.

The blow landed, unexpected and _hard. _There was blood on Bunny's paw when he pulled it away from his nose. For a moment they could not spare, the Guardians stared at Jack Frost in shock.

He had no way to know what the others saw in that moment – a hollow-eyed figure, blood pouring down his cheeks, the expression past the frozen blood so full of hatred that the twisted face was barely recognizable as Jack's.

He felt Tooth's hands pulling him onto the cloud, Bunny hopped on the opposite side, away from Jack, and then they were in the air. Sandman powered through the evil wind, every ounce of his strength needed just to keep the cloud and its passengers together.

Old Man Winter's howls of agony were turning, slowly, back to mad laughter.

"Run, you cowards!" Fury and pain flowed together in the shouts that carried after them on the wind. "Just you run! No one makes it home tonight! NO ONE MAKES IT HOME TONIGHT!"

"Bunny! The lodge?" Tooth asked.

"Still standing," he said, sheathing his remaining boomerang, his voice a little nasal as he was still pressing his paw to his nose where Jack had bloodied it. "Dumped the snow into a massive tunnel. Bloody avalanche flooded about half the tunnels under the state, but I left one clear for the people to evacuate through. Got a couple of the kids on convincing the grown-ups to take it."

The Guardians all breathed a sigh of relief. In the midst of all that had gone wrong, at least the most important thing – keeping the children safe – had not.

"The sleigh," North said, groaning with pain and urgency. "We have to –"

But Sandy shook his head as an image appeared over it. Snowmen were crushing the wreckage of the sleigh, though he showed that the reindeer had run away. North clutched his shoulder as he viewed the image, and hung his head in sadness.

_Inventors._ Mourning their toys when the world was too far gone for toys anymore.

Tears burned Jack's broken eyes, streaming down the bloody ice on his face as he saw his friends in the warped light of the storm – Sandy, straining to do so much as keep his cloud together. North, with an injury that halved the mighty warrior.

He didn't need the evil shards in his eyes to see Bunny for what he was – a suspicious, hateful creature who didn't have the decency to just observe everything that was already evil, in the world – no, he had to _imagine _evil into people who weren't, too. That was nothing new.

But the shards certainly helped highlight it.

That was just it, though. He was starting to understand that his new perspective wasn't a truth – it was a distortion from the shards. Jack looked over the edge of the sandcloud and in the breaks in the clouds, the mountain forest, which should have looked beautiful to him, looked like so much boiled spinach. As they passed high enough above the cloud cover to see the sky beyond, the light of the sun was too glaringly bright, the glare somehow making everything else seem dull and bleak alongside it.

"Jack, let me see your eyes," Tooth said, reaching out for him, containing her horror at his condition. She touched his face, but Jack didn't feel the gentleness he knew from experience that she always she touched him with. Her hands felt like sandpaper on his skin.

It was all wrong. _Everything_ was wrong.

His eyes tried to distort the sight of Tooth – who he knew, in his heart, was so beautiful - to something sinister and ugly. Jack's breath came in short, terrified gasps.

He closed his eyes against the sight of her warping appearance and curled up on his side, covering his eyes with both hands.

"Jack, please –"

"I don't want to look at you. Please don't make me look," he begged, voice cracking. "_Please_."

The other Guardians could only look on in horror as Sandy flew them away on a hostile wind, over a world gripped by a winter that never wanted to let go.

* * *

The storms spread across the world and darkness fell as the light of the sun – _and_ the moon – was blocked out by the stormclouds.

Not far from the abandoned resort, the man in the shadows watched the yellow speck of light disappear beyond the cloud cover. With a bark of laughter, he danced a little softshoe in the snow.

He looked up at the darkening sky and felt the rush of the life-leeching wind. He breathed in the smell of the snow that was smothering the world in darkness.

"Look at the old man go," said Pitch Black to the night-mare that stood beside him, grinning as the fear began to pour in. He ran his hands through his hair, reveling in the rush of power. "And to think, all he needed to start rolling was a _wakeup call_."

Now he just had to wait as the cold set in and the dark fell, and then they children would never let go of their fear again.

Of course, Jokul Frosti was not the most trustworthy. Pitch knew that he'd happily freeze everyone on the planet to death if he were left unsupervised for long. That hardly served Pitch's purposes. Where would he get fear if no one was alive to be afraid?

So of course, Pitch had made that careful little comment to the old man about the new winter spirit seeing the world all wrong. It had done exactly what Pitch had intended it to do. And his intervention during the storm, knocking down Frost's doppelganger so North came closer to help and discovered the ruse, allowed the blowhard to intervene before Frost was killed. It had been timed perfectly.

_With _the added benefit of North getting sharded himself. Pitch could not have been more gleeful about that fortuitous little turn of events.

No, letting Old Man Winter run wild forever wasn't part of the plan. Fortunately, Pitch knew how to play the long game. After all, he'd had a very, very long time to practice.

"Cold and dark, together again," he said, hopping up on the night-mare's back. It whinnied and reared up, leaping into the air. "Why didn't I think of this sooner?"


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: **Sorry for the long delay. I (Kira/Saph) have been pulling really long hours at work due to staffing problems and am moving into a new apartment. This chapter's also reeeaaally long and took a lot of work. Updates will still happen but for a while, we're probably not going to be able to keep to a weekly schedule until life lets up. P.S. We enjoyed your tears from the last chapter. We had a wonderful late-night tipple drinking them.

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**Fjord Mustang: **Yessss, we are a big fan of plotty stuff. We like to work the emotional aspects and (sometimes) romance in but for us, the things we love writing the most are stories that have a bit of everything (much like the original canons do), with plot, solid character arcs, and so on._ "The idea that Jökull Frósti would be a former Viking berserker makes perfect sense given the Norse origins of the Jack Frost winter spirit legends._" Yep yep. We decided to treat the youthful folk figure and the Norse figure as two separate entities._ "Something about it reminds me of a darker version of 'The Snow Queen' where young Kay is... I wonder if there will be a character with a Gerda-like role in this story._" Hahaha, no comment. Read and seeee...

**RedKetchup**: He still has his eyes, yes. The hollowed part is referring to how sunken in Jack's eyes look - which was even worse after him getting all messed up like that.

**terracanon876: **That's the plan! Original flavor fic is our usual go-to when writing fanfic. We want this to feel like a natural continuation of the story. And Jack won't keep himself blind, but only out of necessity. It's hard to run for your life when you're not watching where you're going, after all.

As for all you folks that were reminded of the Ice King, if that's how you're picturing Old Man Winter... you're doing it right. That's a little bit how we see him, just as a much more sinister figure.

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**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders, Kaylin, and Saph

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**Chapter 4**

It took them longer to get to the North Pole than it would have with the sleigh. Sandy was powerful, but he wasn't usually carrying the rest of the Guardians, and they weren't usually fleeing with their tails between their legs.

Bunny was the first off the cloud like he couldn't get away from them all fast enough, chasing shadows down halls that looked worn and splintery to Jack's new vision. He returned with scratchy woolen blankets, garishly colored and hideously patterned. Jack and Tooth stepped off next, then Sandy, and North staggered down before the sandcloud could drop him off in a chair.

North groaned as he landed, favoring his shoulder as Bunny draped one of the blankets around him. "Ah, thank you Bunny," he said, shivering. "Probably safe to say, this will not go down in record as our most triumphant of battles, am I right?" He chuckled, but the chuckle turned into a wince of pain and he clutched at his shoulder. He pulled his coat and shirt away to take a look.

"Already healed over, but still, I cannot move my arm."

A horde of yetis and elves thundered over. The elves skittered around like jangly cockroaches and Jack turned his face away from the sight. A jolt of pain shot through his head as the shards in his eyes dug in deeper, and Jack pressed his palms to his face, groaning over the garbled yeti-speak and North's boisterous attempts to reassure his workers. The jolts of pain spread to his neck and his pulse thundered loudly in his ears. He reached for his staff. Not only was everything hideous, it was loud and grating. He had to get away.

"Jack," Bunny dropped a blanket next to him. "You should -"

"I should have _what_?" Jack exploded. "Called for help? I did, but he made the wind keep them from hearing my voice. I should have not run ahead? Guess what, I wasn't the one that ran ahead without thinking - the others did." His chest rose and fell rapidly as he ran through his tirade. "I watched everyone's backs, even though I didn't know who the heck we were going up against - thanks for that, by the way." He waved at the group. "Considering you're on me all the time about knowing what's what for the mission? Way to go. Really. Thanks for letting me know what we were getting into _before _I got stabbed in the eyes."

He rounded on Bunny again, his fist raised, but still held himself back. "So you can take your complaint about how badly I handled myself and stuff it right into your Easter basket, because I did everything I was supposed to."

The group responded with silence, all eyes looking from Bunny to Jack.

"- You should let us get a look at your eyes," Bunny continued, picking up from where he'd left off. "I was gonna say."

Jack exhaled sharply, turning away from him. "Well not _you_," he growled.

"Jack, let me," said Tooth. He turned to her with dread, not wanting to see her through his sharded eyes.

The elves were keen to help, bringing over a basin of warm water and a clean cloth. Tooth sat Jack down in a chair and tilted his face towards her. He immediately shut his eyes.

"I need you to open your eyes. I need to see how bad the damage is."

Jack shook his head furiously, eyes still closed. "I'd really rather not..."

"Rather not what?" He felt Tooth's fingertips trace over the edge of his ear, a gentle gesture he knew was meant to comfort him. "I don't care how it makes me look to you, Jack. We need to make sure you're okay."

Jack finally blinked his eyes open. He looked into violet eyes filled with concern, and at a nose that looked just as beaky as it always did. The shards sharpened everything they could - trying to turn her into something ferocious, threatening, a caricature of how she must have appeared time and again to enemies who'd dared to harm children on her watch - but that was all they managed to remind Jack of. That Tooth was fierce to people who were bad enough to deserve it, and that she cared enough about the children to tap into that ferocity. There was only so far the shards could twist her image when there was so much about her that was beautiful.

She looked carefully into his eyes. "They're already healed over," she said.

"They're still in there," said Jack. "I can feel them digging in." They did just that, piercing his eyes a little deeper, and Tooth's image jumped again. Jack gasped in pain.

Tooth touched his jawline gently. "Let's get your face cleaned up." She dipped her cloth into the warm water and wiped his face gently, melting away the bloody ice that caked cheeks and chin. Despite the care she took, the cloth felt painfully coarse, like it was sloughing off skin as well as ice. The water stung like something far more acidic.

"There you are," she said softly as the ice began to clear.

"What are these things?" Jack asked, as she wrung out the cloth. "These shards - they looked like pieces of glass -"

"I've never seen anything like them before," Tooth admitted. "Old Man Winter had nothing like this last time we fought -"

Sandy floated next to Tooth, an image of a crowned woman over his head. Even in the small scale of a sand pictogram, her eyes were narrowed with flashing malice. Tooth frowned at the image in confusion, and Sandy replaced it with a snowflake wearing the woman's tiara. The snowflake sprouted arms and lifted a hand-mirror in one.

Understanding flooded Tooth's expression. "The Snow Queen," she said. "But she's been almost powerless for centuries. Her mirror was broken ages ago -"

Sandy shook his finger. Almost powerless was not powerless, after all -

"Except she's dead now, whoever she was," Jack grunted. "Old Man Winter ate her heart. I heard him crowing about it. Does that get us any closer to fixing me and North, or -?"

Tooth pressed her lips together, looking resolved. She lifted the cloth to continue cleaning Jack's eyes. He winced at the burn of the warm water and the scrape of the white cloth on his skin.

"At least now we know what happened to your eyes and North's shoulder. The Snow Queen had a mirror that reflected only the evil in everything that looked into it. Long ago it broke, and the shards scattered across the world. She must have been gathering them when Old Man Winter caught up to her and picked up what she'd already started."

"So, how do we get them out? There isn't a guardian of eye surgery that I don't know about, is there?" Jack jibed.

Tooth glanced at Sandy, who shrugged.

"It doesn't really work that way," she said, as gently as possible, still wiping the frozen blood from Jack's face. "Unfortunately, we're not sure exactly _how _it works. There are a few stories about the shards getting into peoples' eyes, but -"

She trailed off, and Jack thought he could hear the "none of them end well" that she wasn't adding.

"So, what happens next?"

"What happens next is we go looking for a cure," Bunny spoke up, "and I know just where to start asking if it's stories we're after."

_Anansi. _Jack groaned. "Just what my day needs. Another guy who's good at twisting everything into being my fault."

The soft buzzing of fairy wings caught Jack's attention and he looked up to see a few of Tooth's fairies zipping through the skylight, looking like little flying spearheads. Baby Tooth zipped to Tooth, chirping animatedly with news.

"The weather's too bad for the fairies to make it to most of the children," said Tooth, her face falling. Baby Tooth continued chirping. "But the children blame it on the weather, so none of them have lost their belief. It's a mixed blessing, but it frees me up to concentrate on Old Man Winter."

"On eliminating him, right?" Bunny cut in, perking up from his position at the edge of the discussion, where he'd been absentmindedly twirling his one remaining boomerang in thought. "He's too much of a threat to just leave sleeping. This time, I say we find a way to take him out for good."

"I agree." Tooth stood up, gesturing to the elves for a clean cloth. The one she held in hand was soaked through with Jack's blood. "He's a threat to the children, not to mention the rest of the world. We can't risk him running free anymore. North?"

They looked to North, but in a rare moment of un-jolliness, he was clutching his shoulder and looking silently at the ground with his eyes closed against the pain. It was a strange, crystallizing moment - the leader of the Guardians sitting silently, absorbed in his injury, while the others called the shots. The sight hammered home how dire their situation was. As bad as the shards in his eyes were, getting stabbed in the shoulder had to be more dangerous, and Jack was filled with concern for the old man.

Sandy hovered at North's side, but he looked up to join the discussion. He shook his finger in a gentle 'hold on' to Tooth and Bunny, and an image of a human man, wild-haired but with a noble profile, appeared over his head. He pointed to it with a raised eyebrow.

Bunny scoffed, "Yeah, Old Man Winter will be chomping at the bit to take the Enkidu Oath after the beating we gave him."

Sandy kept his finger in the air, as if to say, "still."

"Does anyone want to tell me what the Enkidu Oath even is?" Jack groused. "I forgot to ask after that mission in Africa."

"Words are powerful, Jack," Tooth explained. "They make up the stories that we need in order for children to believe in us. A long time ago, one of our kind discovered that words between us - between myths - held power over us. There's a special oath that we can take and if it's broken, the one who breaks it dies."

"What," Jack raised his eyebrows. "Just like that?"

Sandy snapped his fingers, to say, "just like that," and a skull and crossbones appeared over his head.

"And in three hundred years I've never heard of this because...?" Oh wait, he knew the answer to that one. He rubbed the bridge of his nose and finished the thought himself, "...Because I hardly ever talked to anyone. Not exactly something that'd come up in casual conversation. 'Hey, so are there any magical instant death oaths I should know about?'"

"It's a waste of time," Bunny insisted, his tone dark. "Old Man Winter would never take the Oath."

Tooth glanced at him with the frustrated resignation that said she agreed, even though she was going to say otherwise. "The Enkidu Oath _is _what we usually offer enemies like this," she said, almost as if she was reminding herself as much as Bunny. "But only a few have been willing to take it. Others like Pitch and Old Man Winter, who aren't willing to stop hurting the children, usually refuse."

"Then it is settled," North declared, rising, still draped in the scratchy green blanket. "We will deliver to Old Man Winter the oath, as is only right - but prepare for battle, as we expect. First, a cure is of the utmost importance - we are in no condition to battle anyone, much less a foe so great. Still!" His merry face still beamed as he stood, seeming to find new vigor in their plan. "Is simple enough. We will go in search of the story fellow at once, find a cure, then face Jokul Frosti again."

"Think I could take a look around, see if you've got anything I can replace a weapon with?" Bunny cut in. "I lost a boomerang in that fight." He grinned, and Jack couldn't tell if the edge on his appearance – the decidedly vicious edge – was the shards warping his vision, or if Bunny just really got that much of a kick out of breaking a weapon on an enemy's skull. "Couldn't've come up with a better way for it to go. That was a good crack I got on the old ratbag."

Something about the satisfaction in his voice grated on Jack's ears as much as - frankly - the sight of the rabbit grated on Jack's eyes.

"And _I'm _the selfish, irresponsible one?"

Jack's voice cut through the elder four's rising moods. They looked at him with concern as Jack sat back from Tooth and snarled at Bunny.

"Speaking of things _I_ didn't do wrong this time, what exactly happened to not running off? Or better yet, to _taking the group with you _when there's something big to deal with?

"Honestly, Jack, is not much I could have done against avalanche –" North put in, and his attempt to placate Jack did nothing but fuel his anger.

"Well there's plenty _I _could have done!" he snapped.

Bunny, to his surprise, offered no counterpoint, and that angered him too.

"You left us, just like you yelled at me for doing on the Africa mission, and now you're bragging about getting one in on Old Man Winter? How about how much we could have used someone getting a good one in on him, oh, before _this _happened?" he pointed to his eyes with one hand, and North's sharded shoulder with the other.

Bunny still said nothing, crossing his arms and looking away. But he didn't get angry.  
Jack almost laughed at the irony. All the times he _hadn't _wanted Bunny to get angry at him, he had, and now the one time he was just itching to expend some anger, the rabbit just wouldn't give him any to work with.

"Jack," said Tooth, "There's no way to know Old Man Winter wouldn't still –"

"Why are you all defending him?" Jack rounded on Tooth. "I get that you've had hundreds of years to be friends, but while you were having tea parties and talking about your feelings, did you know how he was treating _me_ the whole time? How he still treats me? He's always on my back for doing _exactly _what he just did – so why, when he does it, does _he _get a free pass?" He turned back to Bunny. "So which is it? Does it turn out the great Easter Bunny is fallible after all, or is a mistake only a mistake when _I _do it?"

"Jack," Bunny said, his voice as placating as he could make it, "You're not yourself right now. When you don't have the shards -"

"You wouldn't know!" Jack exploded. "How would _you_ know when I'm myself? You never knew me at all! You had more than three hundred years to know me, and you still thought I'd be selfish enough to hurt people just for the sake of making a good hard winter. You always assumed the worst of me, so why are you letting a little thing like these -" he pointed to his eyes - "get in the way of your judgment? They've changed my eyes, not my heart. I really _am _this mad at you, and I'd still be this mad without them!"

Bunny looked away from Jack, still without anger. He crossed his arms, as if he didn't want to hear what was being said, but was steeling himself to endure hearing it.

No. He _had _to be getting indignant. He was just stuffing it down because of the shards.

"Jack -" Tooth started, lifting her hand to try to calm him down but he held his up to stop her and stood up, walking slowly towards Bunny.

"Why so quiet?" he asked, his voice an angry rasp. "You _have _to be itching to to tell me to shut up and stop being a stupid kid who doesn't know what he's talking about. That running off is only okay when you're the mighty Easter Bunny -" he held up his hands in a 'ooh, big and important' gesture "- who knows all and magically never makes a mistake, even when he leaves his teammates alone to get beaten and injured? How I'll never do anything right, how deep down, maybe I don't want to get things right, because secretly I want to make the world one big iceberg like Old Man Winter? "

"I'm not doing this," Bunny insisted, but he finally uncrossed his arms, his voice touched with unspent anger. "I'm not having this conversation when you're like this."

"Well _I_ am. You thought _I _was behind those storms," Jack spat, bile rising again, a cold knot in his throat. "Did you always think I was like that? That I'd kill people for fun? Have you just been _dying_ for for me to prove you right? You're looking forward to killing Old Man Winter. When you thought I was the one behind the storms, were you looking forward to killing _me_, too?"

"That's enough!" Bunny finally inhaled, his temper raised. He clenched his paws in fists, looking Jack directly in his sharded eye. "That is _not _what I thought. You and Old Man Winter are completely different stories."

"Well you know what he's trying to do, right?" Jack shot back. "He's trying to _make _us the same story." He pointed to his eyes. "You know why he's done this to me, right? What he's already done to me?"

The Guardians looked at him blankly, and he shook his head. "He's changing my belief. He told me so. He's making the kids think all this bad stuff is me." He shot another glare at Bunny. "Maybe he should team up with _you_, since he wouldn't have to convince you I'm the worst. So hey, you'll get what you want after all - a winter spirit to blame for everything that goes wrong. It just won't be me. Because I'll be dead."

"That will never happen," Bunny insisted, and Jack was almost gratified that through his anger, he sounded shaken.

"Yes it will. He's going to make the world think we're the same person. And then he's going to eat my heart."

"Jack," Tooth cut in, her eyes wide and horrified.

"_What_?" he snapped at her. Then, feeling guilty for it, he repeated more calmly, "What?"

She pointed at him. The others were also staring with wide, horrified eyes – minus Bunny, anyway. He'd walked away and was leaning against a wall, his back to the group, only his heaving shoulders showing that he was breathing very deeply. Satisfaction flooded through Jack, cold and bitter, at having gotten the rabbit angry after all.

Tooth fluttered a little closer. "Are you doing that on purpose?"

Jack heard a crisp, quiet sound – the kind the snow made when it was freshly fallen and settling. He looked down at himself, only to find that his entire body was covered with frost. It had spread over his skin in a thin layer, and icicles hung from his clothes.

He touched his hair. Ice had settled there too, and as he touched it, the ice spread, pulling his hair to hang in icicles over his face.

He exhaled a puff of ice-cold air, visible in the warmth of the workshop. More little clouds puffed from his lips as he breathed quicker, panicked breaths.

"What's happening to me?" he asked in a hushed, quaking voice.

"Your heart is growing cold." North stood and walked over to Jack, still touching his shoulder. "I can feel it, too. This is the danger of the Snow Queen's mirror – the shards are always able to freeze a heart, no matter where they entered the body. In your case, with your eyes, you are vulnerable – they make you see only evil in the world, and when one sees only evil, the heart is more open to the cold."

North placed a gentle hand on Jack's shoulder, but even that light touch seemed heavy-handed, and North's face was still shadowed by the ferocity that head shocked Jack during his fight with Old Man Winter.

"If we let it, our hearts will be frozen, Jack. We must both fight this to remain ourselves."

The weight of North's warning sank into him, and as fear filled Jack, more ice creaked to life on his body. He was losing himself. He was losing his heart.

He was just starting to absorb the weight of that when he saw, past north, Bunny's ears suddenly twitch, and the rabbit looked up.

"Cover!" Bunny yelled suddenly. He spun and rushed at the others – "_Take cover!"_

They barely had time to yell before the ground opened up beneath them. The elves, yetis, and North fell through, and Bunny tackled Tooth and Sandy directly into the tunnel. Jack grabbed his staff, spinning in the air beside him, and whipped it into place to fly out of the tunnel when from behind them came the noise of an explosion, and a rush of cold wind that froze the frost already building on his face.

Ice shot through the tunnel after them. Jack whipped his staff at the oncoming attack, redirecting it into the wall of ice they were tunneling through. The tunnel echoed with groans as pressure built behind the obstructed ice, but it held. Jack skimmed down the tunnel to catch up with the others, and emerged amidst the Guardians, yetis, and elves in the sleigh room.

"Everyone accounted for?" Jack asked. The sleigh cavern groaned as above them, the workshop sustained another impact.

Bunny stamped another tunnel open, but didn't tackle anyone into it. "The elves and yetis can evacuate through that but we have to hurry. Old Man Winter's struck again," he announced. The elves immediately scurried into the tunnel, leaping into it like a slide, little jangly shrieks of panic (or possibly excitement) echoing through the cavern.

The yetis weren't so quick to evacuate, looking to North for orders.

"Phil, you are coming with me to mail room. Execute emergency plan Tinsel Cocoa Gingerbread Bravo. The rest, evacuation plan number three - you know your assignments. Make sure entire pole is clear. Sandy, Tooth, is dangerous, but Old Man Winter must be distracted until Pole is clear."

"On it!" said Tooth. Sandy nodded grimly, and the two zipped off to do the near-impossible.

"Jack, you must stay here and guard our exit while others evacuate. Is vital Old Man Winter does not get you as he wants. Bunny, stay with Jack. If the rest of us fall, protect him with your life."

Bunny, fully prepared to rush out with Tooth and Sandy to face Old Man Winter, stared at North in disbelief. "North, _what?"_

"You can't fly," North reminded him, "and if Old Man Winter gets Jack, he becomes unstoppable. Please," he said, the sudden gentleness in his voice contrasting against the urgency of the situation. "Clear my home. Make for certain they are safe."

The younger yetis were shepherding some of the older ones through the tunnel first, but the panicking elves slipped them up like marbles underfoot. North held Bunny's gaze for just a moment, his expression strangely soft.

Bunny held North's gaze back, then nodded silently, resheathing his boomerang. North departed, leaning heavily on Phil for support, leaving Jack and Bunny and a river of evacuees pouring through the tunnels.

"Listen up, mates!" Bunny shouted over the noise of the evacuation. "I want a line for yetis and a line for elves, opposite sides, same tunnel! Yetis, you're on my side. Elves, to Jack."

"I'm not working with _you_," Jack said, his voice almost shrill.

"Yeah you are," Bunny responded, as the elves, confused, stopped mid-flood to Jack, looking back and forth between him and Bunny. "This isn't about us for now, it's about them." he pointed to the elves, who all looked at each other, and completed their flood to Jack, swarming around his feet and tumbling over the edge of the tunnel. His expression to Jack was entreating.

Jack sighed. In this case, at least, Bunny was right. "Okay, listen up guys, keep moving, try not to knock each other over."

The elves were pretty bad at the not-knocking-each-other-over thing, but fortunately their line wasn't really as crucial to maintain as the yetis. So long as the elves went sliding out on their side of the tunnel, they were so lightweight that none of them could really hurt each other in the jostle. With Jack and Bunny each directing a respective side, it wasn't long before the last yeti went sliding down the tunnel, to the last sound of a jingling elf-bell.

The eerie silence that settled in the sleigh launch was broken only by the sounds of Sandy and Tooth fighting Old Man Winter outside. Jack stood silently as Bunny leaned into the tunnel that lead from the workshop to the sleigh launch, listening intently. "North and Phil made it to the mailroom," he said, a second before Jack heard a distant hum of machinery. But Bunny was still leaning into the tunnel, his ears twitching back and forth.

"We have to do a sweep," he said suddenly, turning to Jack. "One of the elves got left behind. C'mon."

"Oh, so I'm still the only one orders apply to?" Jack snarled. Bunny stopped halfway up the tunnel.

"Didn't you hear me? One of the elves got stuck. North and Phil won't hear it in time. If we don't get it, no one else will know to."

"Why should I c -"

Jack stopped, looking down at himself as the ice thickened on his body.

He'd almost just said he didn't care about one of the elves. Annoying as they were and as much as he enjoyed freezing them, they didn't deserve real harm. They were innocents, with minds like children themselves, and they were always kind to Jack every time he visited the Pole, making him cocoa and cookies and treating him as if he belonged there.

North said he had to fight it. As angry as he was at Bunny, he couldn't let those negative feelings fuel the - well, "fire" wasn't really the appropriate metaphor here, was it.

Jack flew after Bunny, breaking the ice off his hair and clothes. "Where's the noise coming from?"

"Upper workshop. He musta gotten iced in one of the early blasts." Bunny took the tunnel as quickly as Jack could follow. They emerged into the main room of the workshop, and the full devastation was clear to them now. The wooden tiers of the levels creaked and groaned dangerously, and ice bulged through the broken wood like tumors. Jack could hear the elf now - the faintest tinkling of a bell cutting through the groan of growing ice.

Bunny leaped up the tiers to one of the jagged ice floes. An elf was half trapped in it, shaking his belled head frantically as if Jack and Bunny hadn't arrived yet.

"I know you don't do the un-freezing, but now's a good time to have another go," Bunny said, as the workshop groaned under another blast. The windows across from them cracked, and the sound of Sandy's lashing whips and Tooth's battle cries filtered through.

Jack pointed his staff at the ice and focused, all his will bent on making it do the _opposite _of what he usually asked ice to do - but no dice. He let out an inarticulate noise of frustration and smashed his staff against the ice.

"It's not working!"

Bunny whipped out his boomerang and joined Jack in smashing the ice. The workshop groaned as more of Old Man Winter's attacks made it past Tooth and Sandy, punching new holes in the walls. The ice holding the elf in place fractured slowly, but finally the elf came away, still covered with chunks of ice. Bunny pressed the half-frozen elf into the thick ruff of fur at his chest, where it clung, shivering as it nestled deeper into the warm fur.

"Jack! Bunny!" North's voice reached them from the bottom of the workshop hall. He and Phil looked at them with disbelief. "You left tunnel!"

Bunny leaped to the bottom floor, flashing North a glimpse of the thawing elf as he landed. North's expression cleared and he nodded, and Jack was surprised by a sudden, sick burst of disappointment. He'd almost - not almost, he'd definitely wanted to see Bunny get yelled at for disobeying orders. It was about time somebody who wasn't him did.

The sound of shattering glass filled the air. Sandy fell through a broken skylight, regaining consciousness just in time to put a puffy cloud of sand between himself and a hard landing. Tooth fell through another window - one that hadn't already been broken. Shattered glass spun around her as she fell, faster than Sandy had.

"Tooth!" Jack cried out. She wouldn't be able to stop herself before she hit the ground. He shot upward and caught her with his free arm, but her momentum would have sent him crashing into the hard floor if Sandy hadn't cushioned their landing with a puffy cloud.

Old Man Winter dropped through one of the broken windows, floating towards them in sick fluttering movements like a huge, misshapen snowflake.

"The Big Five isn't much of an improvement over the Big Three," he said, as he landed heavily. He locked his gaze on Jack and Tooth, his smile curling sinisterly as he advanced on them. "Nothing worse than a lukewarm debut, unless it's a _lame sequel_. I would know. I watched The Deadening I _and_II: Revenge of the Deadener."

Bunny leaped over the downed pair and stood in front of them, his lone boomerang at the ready.

Old Man Winter paused mid-step, glancing at the boomerang, then at the elf still clinging to Bunny's chest fur. His smile turned patronizing. "Nice accessory, bunny rabbit. You gonna start throwing elves when you run out of fancy sticks?"

The elf squeaked in terror, but clung paralyzed where it was. Bunny hefted the boomerang, defiant, and Old Man Winter's smile gave way to a glare - the sort of glare an old, seasoned warrior gave to a young one whose defiance had finally ceased to be more amusing than it was annoying.

"You got a good one in on me behind my back," Old Man Winter said. "Real good going there, Rabbit. You won't be so lucky face to face."

Bunny drew in a ragged, furious breath. "_Try me_."

He shifted into a fighting stance in front of the downed Guardians. Old Man Winter drew back his hand, an ice spear forming in his grip.

The ground shook beneath them like an angry beast.

"What the -?" Old Man Winter tensed as the workshop floor opened behind him. Something huge and noisy, thrumming with a noise like an angry swarm of bees, rose out of the chasm.

Jack's eyes widened. A massive wooden face rose behind Old Man Winter, jaws clacking with ferocity. It was a nutcracker, a massive nutcracker about thirty feet tall, painted in bright reds and whites and blues. Jack recognized it as the nutcracker from the mailroom, the one that had been attached to the wall, with all the mail to Santa spewing out of its mouth to be sorted by the elves. Apparently, it hadn't been as attached to the wall as Jack had thought.

"How is it doing that?" Jack called out.

"Plan Tinsel Cocoa Gingerbread Bravo," said North. "Did you really think I would build giant nutcracker to just have it stand against wall in mailroom? Pah."

The nutcracker swiped a massive hand at Old Man Winter, who darted out of the way. Bunny, still in his fighting stance, moved only to tap his back foot on the ground. The floor fell open beneath them and they slid down the mossy green path out of danger.

Jack heard Old Man Winter's enraged yell - but didn't get to see Bunny's triumphant grin at the winter spirit, prompting it, just before he stepped backwards into the tunnel after the other four.

* * *

The children tried to play in the snow. It was fun, at first, but then the air grew too cold and the snow fell down just a little too hard. It stuck to their hats and gloves, numbing their faces. They could barely feel their fingers anymore under their gloves and mittens.

"Guys, I think we should go in," said Pippa, looking up as the snow turned to sleet. The wind only reinforced her judgement, blowing so hard it knocked Monty over.

Jamie hadn't partaken in much of the play. He'd been looking worriedly into the sky, in what he was fairly sure was a northerly direction, the way Jack had flown off from his room.

"Why is Jack doing this?" asked Monty as he tried to wipe the snow from his glasses. "This isn't fun anymore."

"It's not Jack," Jamie said, tightening his scarf around his face. "He said something was wrong. He said the other Guardians needed him."

"If it's not Jack, who is it?" said Claude, as he and his brother turned towards their home, shivering.

"I don't know who it is," Jamie said pensively, looking at the roiling, grey clouds, "but it's _not_ Jack."

* * *

The wreckage of the giant mecha nutcracker lay smoking in the snow. Old Man Winter, impressed by the fight it had put up, refrained from spitting on its remains.

"All things considered, Wilhelm, that was the best fight anything's put up since I got back in business," he said to his shadowy companion. He'd taken to calling it Wilhelm. It seemed to fit the creature somehow. "You know - minus the Big Three. Oh I give them crap, but they're always good for a scrap or two. Don't ever tell them I said that. But - giant mechanical nutcracker. That was an unexpected treat. Way less disappointing than the Frost kid."

He lifted his hand, power gathering around his frostbitten fingers as he drew from the ice around him, and fired one final blast at the workshop. The last of the shattered wreckage of Santa's workshop crumbled, and fell into the canyon below.

Old Man Winter laughed as the snow cleared. "Good show, Wilhelm, good show. Now go get 'em boy."

The lanky, shadowy creature whined in protest.

"What? Whaddaya mean there's no trail? There's always a trail. Okay, maybe it's an underground trail, but it still exists, right? Wilhelm, I know you're new at this subordinate thing, but around here we don't just give up when the going gets hard, okay? We don't double up, we double _down_.'

Wilhelm growled.

"Yeah I'll give you that one, it sounded better in my head." Old Man Winter looked across the snowy plains, unbroken by any sort of footsteps and dusted with lightly falling snow. "Okay, so there's no trail. Well in that case, let's go find one. You take the western hemisphere, I'll take the eastern."

Old Man Winter and the creature called Wilhelm streaked off in opposite directions - one in close pursuit of the Guardians as they fled underground, though neither knew it yet.

* * *

The tunnel out of the Pole opened up in Canada, where the yetis and elves were waiting in a snowy forest overshadowed in the west by the Rocky mountains. North quickly ordered them off, and they departed in small teams of two and three, mostly to the north and into the mountains. The yetis were toymakers by trade, but they were still well suited to the wild lands.

"You okay?" Jack asked Tooth when they finally arrived at their journey's end. As they'd slid through the tunnels, he hadn't let go of her waist.

"I'm fine. Just a little banged up." She stood, shaky, but on her own two feet. Jack, suddenly self-conscious as his hand brushed over her hip, let go and turned to Sandy. The little man looked just as wobbly.

"How about you? You okay, Sandy?"

Sandy nodded, still wincing.

"Sasquatch sightings going to be big this year," North mused, his smile tinged with regret as the last of the yetis faded into the forest, with the last of the elves clinging to its fur (it was the elf that Jack and Bunny had rescued from the ice, and it had been very reluctant to let go of its grip on Bunny's fur - so reluctant that it had taken a handful of downy undercoat with it).

"We'll help rebuild the workshop, mate," said Bunny, as he crouched next to North. "We get this wrapped up before Easter and I've got a whole offseason to help you out."

"We all will," said Tooth, Sandy nodding in agreement as they hovered near to North. "I might not be able to help as often as Bunny, but I'll keep the fairies on shifts at the pole."

"I'll help whenever he's not around," groused Jack, jerking his thumb at Bunny. He felt a little more ice settle on him as Bunny winced and he failed to care.

"Thank you, friends," said North, treating them all to a smile that, while tinged with regret, was still bright and genuine. "But before we are counting chickens, perhaps is best we focus on matter at hand. We need safe place to rest, and way to find this friend of yours -" he nodded to Bunny. "Safe place should preferably be warm," he added, shivering harder as a cold wind blew through the forest, rustling the pines and picking up stray snowflakes.

Warmth made Jack think of the Warren, which was never below balmy. All that green wasn't an appealing thought, but he could hardly think of a place farther from Old Man Winter's sight. "If His Stuffiness over here isn't afraid of everyone else seeing his million self-portraits, we could thaw out in the Warren -"

"Oh no," Bunny protested. "Nobody's going anywhere near the Warren with Old Man Winter on our tails. I will not draw his eye there."

The shards sliced a little into Jack's eyes, and he snorted even as he winced in pain. "So we can risk North's home but not yours. Good to know."

"No, he's right," Tooth corrected. "If Old Man Winter set his sights on the Warren, the consequences would be much greater than the destruction of the pole. "

Jack glanced at North to see how he was taking that barb, but judging by his calm composure, he seemed to agree.

"The Warren goes, spring goes," Bunny elaborated. "I won't risk that." He hefted his only remaining boomerang, looking displeased with his lack of weaponry. "Not even to resupply. If we hide out anywhere, it has to be somewhere nobody would think to associate with us. Africa fits the bill. I say we head there, hole Jack and North up somewhere warm, and keep an eye out for Anansi."

Tooth and Sandy glanced at Jack and North. "We need to stabilize North's arm and thaw them out a little, if we can," said Tooth, as North shivered violently. "That's a long journey to make with his injury."

Bunny nodded. "I'll get a fire going."

Under other circumstances, Jack might have been interested in watching the process. Bunny could make a fire out of an ice cube - literally. Jack had seen him start a fire on the mission with North and the wendigo using a chunk of ice as a lense, like a kid would use a magnifying glass to focus the sun. On the mission before that, he'd even had Jack help with something called a firesaw. To Jack, who was used to icing wood down instead of setting it alight, that had been utterly novel - the process of sawing one stick across another, watching nothing happen, then smoke, then a smoldering bundle of embers that Bunny breathed into a flame. It was the most magical of the mundane things Jack had ever helped do. He'd laughed, delighted to bring something that was so not what he did naturally into being, and Bunny had smiled, too, as if at Jack's delight - that same smile he'd given him the day in the Warren, before Easter, when Sophie was just falling asleep.

_"Not bad yourself, mate."_

But the smile had said something else - that he'd drawn some conclusion about Jack that had less to do with _not bad_ and more to do with downright _good, _a rare new impression, after all their years of hassling each other over the seasons.

Jack couldn't even picture that smile anymore.

Maybe it was because it had never existed in the first place. Maybe he'd only wanted to see it so badly that he'd imagined it, longing for someone, anyone - even someone who had disliked him from the get-go - to like him.

Maybe the shards hadn't warped his vision in Bunny's case. Maybe they'd just taken the scales from his eyes.

Bunny built the fire without asking for help, then loped to the edge of the firelight. Only then, did Jack take a seat by the fire next to North. The old cossack - looking older now than Jack had ever seen him - looked over at him and smiled sadly.

"Would take the ice from your eyes for Christmas," he said, raising his uninjured arm and making as if to flick something small and irritating from his fingers. "Phsst! No one should have to see world like that."

Jack didn't smile, but he did edge closer to North. In the light of the fire - and in the light of his usual kindness - the image of him as something harsh and dangerous was fading.

"It's not just the splinters," Jack said slowly. "I can feel their belief in me changing."

"In your belly."

"Yeah. In my belly. It makes me want to be sick."

North put his hand on Jack's shoulder.

"This..." the old man began, and then broke off with a sigh. "I will not lie to you, Jack. This is not something I have experienced. Not this. Poison, yes, I have seen poison in water, maybe that is the best way to think of this." He stroked his beard and shivered, moving closer to the fire. "Poison needs an antidote because we cannot stop drinking the water. For without it, we will only die sooner."

"Maybe it's better this way," Jack said darkly, drawing his knees up to his chin. "Better than getting their hopes up and letting them down. Maybe I've gotten better over time - even if Bunny can't see it - but there's always a chance of me messing up again like I did in Africa. If he thinks I'm going to mess up again, maybe I am. Maybe I'm just that terrible."

An icicle dangled from his nose and he broke it off, wiping at his nose afterward.

"No, not terrible," North said firmly. "Just young. And no more of that 'better this way' talk, is not productive and is not good for you. If you give up, the Old Man will have already won, and neither of us are dead yet!"

"And what a ray of sunshine that thought is." Jack rolled his eyes.

"Besides, bad mission is not the end of world, Jack. Bunny has not been fair to you over what happened there."

"Oh no, it wasn't the end of the world. It was just almost the end of my life, Bunny's life, Anansi's life..."

And that kid, had he risked that kid? He'd caught the roof in time, hadn't he? But what if he hadn't?

"Tell me one thing, and this is very important," said North, "did you learn from it?"

Jack looked into the fire and pursed his lips. 'Fools can learn,' Anansi had said, and when you got right down to it, he was right. Jack had figured a few things out about himself that he hadn't even realized were a thing before going into that mission. He'd stumbled over fears he hadn't known were there, caused by hurts he'd long since ignored - largely out of a complete incapacity to do anything about them in the past.

He could do something about them now and since then, he'd learned even more.

"I learned a lot from it, actually," Jack admitted. "It's more putting it into action that's been hard to figure out sometimes. I've been trying."

"It always is," said North. "Just learning, though, is very good start. But what you must take from all this is that this judgment of you says more about Bunny than it says about you. On this mission, with Old Man Winter, you were_ not _the one that made mistake. We were. We were the ones that ran ahead. Even if it seemed you were with us because of the shadow of the snowman Jokul left in your place, we should not have let you get so far out of sight that we believed it was you. You saved us, and yet you were the one that paid the price for our mistake."

Jack just kept looking in the fire. "He made it look like I was still with you?"

"Yes. A shape that looked like you, fighting in the snow behind us. When it was knocked over, I went to help, only to find it wasn't you. A doppleganger!"

"I thought -"

"You thought what?"

"I thought you'd just went off without me," Jack admitted. "Without looking back."

"Never. But we still put you in harm's way. And now we will do all we can to fix this."

"Would you all kindly stop talking, and pretend it's not because I asked you to, please," said Bunny, suddenly, so very politely that North actually fell silent out of surprise.

" – and I said, that's not a lateral incisor, that's his mother," Tooth trailed off as if at the end of a story to Sandy. The only sound now was of the wind in the pine trees, and Bunny sniffing the air intently. He loped into Jack's view, ears tense at attention, whipping back and forth to catch some sound the others couldn't hear.

Jack stared through the embers of the rising fire, the sparks dancing against the dark firs. It was a good while before he realized two of those sparks - large, yellow, and glowing in the dark, dense underbrush - were not moving.

"Everyone get ready to duck into the tunnel," Bunny said, in the same soft, conversational tone, shifting his weight to one foot.

There was a shape, suddenly, around the burning eyes. A red tongue tasted the air. Yellowed fangs gleamed, ugly, but sharp, in the firelight.

"Why," Jack said, as the stationary embers flashed out, then back into view in the darkness, "is the bunny rabbit afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"

"No."

A growl cut the cold night air like a saw on the back of Jack's neck. It reached deep down into his brain - to the part that remembered the long nights of winter when you had to worry that something would be hungry enough to walk in range of musket fire to steal a baby from a cradle, or catch a man out late on the road, or wait outside your door until you simply couldn't survive inside, alone, any longer – and _squeezed._

"That's not the Big Bad Wolf, and I'm afraid of it," Bunny admitted. "Get ready."

He stamped the ground. The forest floor groaned, but didn't open.

"What's going on?"

"The ground is frozen," Bunny announced, an edge of panic creeping into his voice. "It's frozen solid - it won't open for me!"

It charged at them into the firelight - a wolf starved so near to death that Jack could count every bone in its spine. Its tongue lolled and its eyes rolled, so starved that absolutely no fear of musket – or sword – or boomerang – could be stronger than its hunger.

Bunny struck it with his boomerang, slowing it down long enough for Tooth to yank one of North's swords from his scabbard and charge in. The wolf dodged her slashes and snapped at her with a noise like a safe door slamming shut, each bite just narrowly missing wounding the her. Jack reached for his staff, but whips lashed around his and North's waists, pulling them onto a cloud of sand.

"No!" Jack yelled as he struggled off the sand-cloud. "Sandy, I'm hurt, not dead! I can still fight!"

"One arm I cannot use, so what? I have been blessed with a spare!" North pulled his remaining sword and jumped, landing at Jack's side.

Sandy looked at them with a skeptical wince, but snapped his whips in preparation for battle. The three of them charged to Bunny and Tooth's aid, but the wolf was already backing up, flanked by the two warriors, growling.

It inhaled, its concave flanks and bony ribs expanding like a balloon. The gale it blew out sent them tumbling into the trees.

Jack slammed against a spruce, falling to the ground with a wrist-twisting thud. Beside him, North groaned, having been flung against a tree on his good arm. The entire forest glittered with a light dusting of dreamsand.

North snapped to attention. "Sandy!"

A few particles rose unsteadily, as if on a breeze, and resolved themselves into wiggly letters - _"I'm OK."_

The rest of the glowing gold sand began to collect until it again formed a round little man. Sandy stumbled in mid-air as he finished reassembling himself, still woozy from the force of the gale. North caught him with his good arm.

Tooth groaned from up ahead. Jack spotted her crumpled against a tree, just in time to see the lone, starving wolf leap on her before she did.

"NO!" he shouted, throwing ice spears to intercept the wolf, but he was too late. Tooth screamed as the wolf dug its teeth into her, but the wolf screamed as she bit back, slashing a bloody arc in its ragged fur with North's sword.

The wolf jumped back with a mouth full of feathers and blood. It licked its fangs and a horrible noise came out of it - a moan of delight that was unwolflike and monstrous.

White noise filled Jack's head as he threw all the ice magic he could at it. The wolf puffed up to blow him away again, and the forest was suddenly full of freezing, slashing sleet. Tooth must have managed to slash the wolf again from her vantage point because the wind cut out suddenly, the ice stuck, and then Tooth was flitting to Jack's side, her arm open and bleeding.

The ice covering the wolf cracked, then shattered as it shook its head free and _howled _to the sky. The howl transformed in the Guardians' ears, becoming a screech of terror that found their own fear and grabbed it by the neck and shook it. Their ears filled with the screeches of thousands of things that had died, scared, about to be eaten.

"Over here!"

Bunny's shout reached them as more of the ice covering the wolf splintered and the howl died out. He stood behind them beside an open tunnel, waving them on.

The Guardians charged for it, and skimmed down the mossy tunnel as the ice shattered with a tremendous noise behind them. The darkness of the tunnel became absolute and Bunny surged into the lead, guiding them through and into the open air again.

They emerged in what looked like the same snowy forest, before a small cave. Jack rounded on Bunny. "Exactly why aren't we farther away?"

"Vancouver Island," said Bunny. "It'll have more trouble crossing water than anything else." he turned to Tooth. "Let's have a look at that."

"And we're not on Maui right now for that very reason, why?"

Bunny didn't answer, looking at Tooth's wound. Her pretty face twisted in a wince as together they inspected it, glancing at each other like neither wanted to point out exactly how bad it was.

"Exactly how bad is this?" Jack asked, breaking the silence.

"It's - not _that _bad," said Tooth, but she was lying like a rug. The shards highlighted the falsehood, but Jack didn't need to have them to see that. "We'll just - clean it up for now, won't we, Bunny?"

"I'll have to go fossick for a few things, but yeah, we can get it cleaned." His half-wince said "at least."

"Clean?" Jack almost scoffed. Their wounds didn't get infected. They were myths. They healed fast.

Unless, a treacherous thought reminded him, the wounds were supernatural. Like shards of a magic mirror in a person's eyes. Or the teeth of a wolf that could huff, and puff, and blow a Sandman apart.

"Stop it," he spat, resentment building up in his chest. "Stop trying to spare me the gory details. I already see more gory details than any of you even know are here to be seen."

The elder four all looked at each other, as if jointly realizing that Jack was right.

"You called it the Big Bad Wolf," Bunny said, while Tooth cradled her scabbing-over arm. "That's what any human would call it, but it's a bit of a misnomer. Wolves that get by being big and bad have got packs to lead, moose to take down. But to a human, any wolf is Big and Bad, and that back there is the wolf that is bad to humans. It doesn't have a pack. It can't take down a moose, because that's not what lone wolves do. They take down small creatures. Slow creatures. Children. Humans."

"And now it's got my scent," said Tooth, looking at her arm.

"But we're not human, or small, or slow," Jack protested. "Why's it after us?"

"We were all human once," Tooth reminded Jack. "Or small," she added, glancing at Bunny. "Or both. We all had that fear once, even if it was just a quiet warning."

"And it has a lot of people still afraid of it," Bunny added. "Children never stop believing in the Big Bad Wolf, because no matter what happens to that one, Big Bad Wolves will actually exist - and so will desperate, starving ones."

"So it's got Tooth's scent now. All the better to follow us to the ends of the earth with," Jack said, his eyes widening just slightly in alarm.

Well, it was probably more accurate to say that it would follow just Tooth to the ends of the Earth, but that prospect was horrifying in and of itself. He tried not to think about it, tried to let the cold dull the panic, but the thought of a world without Tooth stirred the depths of the frozen pool that had collected at the center of him.

This thing wanted to rip Tooth out of the world. And she was the only thing left in the world that was still beautiful to him.

"Bunny," Tooth asked, before he could go looking for whatever he needed to clean her arm, "What happened back there with the tunnels?"

"It has to be another of Old Man Winter's effects," Bunny said. "It was like a vein of permafrost was running right underneath the forest. Once the wolf blew us beyond it I could get a tunnel open, but -"

"But we can't even rely on the tunnels anymore for a quick exit," Jack finished for him. "More good news."

"We'll just have to travel often and carefully," Bunny insisted. "Speaking of often, we need to get on the move as soon as we clean Tooth's bite up. Stay in the cave and I'll be back in a tic -"

But his ears twitched, precisely as they all heard the same sound of something landing heavily on the snow. A lumpy snow figure lurched up out of the snowbank next to them, huge and alarmingly shapeless. The Guardians launched their attacks all at once.

A sharp, shiny black leg shot out from the mass of snow, knocking Bunny's boomerang aside. Another countered Sandy's sandwhips, and four more burst through the thick coat of ice Jack blasted the snow with.

"Please stop, I'm running out of legs," Anansi quipped, looking as if he hoped no one else would throw, whip, or fire anything at him.

"Anansi!" the relief in Bunny's voice was palpable. "How'd you find us?"

"You happen to be in the middle of a story, my friend." Anansi brushed the remaining snow from himself, shaking it from his spider-like dreads and the multicolored, many striped scarf he had wound in a pile around his neck. Between the eight spider legs and the puffy blue parka he wore over his dashiki, it was easy to see how a thick covering of snow would make him indistinguishable from another of Old Man Winter's snow monsters. "And that story happens to involve me." He bared his even white teeth in a gleaming grin that made the snow around them look dull in the moonlight. "Of course I could find you."

Tooth, next to Jack, lowered her face and lifted her hand to her mouth. Jack turned and saw she was covering a very small smile - and a blush to boot. Jack looked back at Anansi, still baring his Adonis-quality teeth, and felt several foot-long icicles form on him as he inhaled an indignant breath.

He felt a rare moment of gratitude to Bunny as the Guardian of Hope blocked Tooth's view, greeting his friend. "Aren't you a sight for sore eyes. We were about to go looking for you, mate. One day you'll have to tell me how you do this, even if it is a lie."

"Would you believe that now, of all times, is the time for at least one truth to come to light?" Anansi's smug smile now showed no teeth, but that didn't make Jack want to see something heavy fall on him any less. "A truth quite a long time in coming, in fact."

"Well are you going to drag the drama out until the Wolf finds us, or are you gonna get to the point first?" Bunny asked.

Anansi pouted a little. "Let me have at least a _little _drama. If you ask me, this is about the least thematically appropriate time to unveil this. Manny has many virtues, but even he cannot always plan a perfect story, and this is not _my _story, after all." Anansi spread his arms, all ten of them. "Presenting, friends, your hidden predecessor - the Guardian of Stories."

The Guardians stared at him in blank surprise - all but Bunny.

"And how long have you been sitting on that one?" he asked, his tone skeptical, but far from disbelieving.

"Since the beginning," said Anansi, directing his gleaming - charming - grin at their oldest, the Sandman. "Yes, the _very _beginning, little man of my dreams."

Sandy's mild expression turned slightly surprised - then he lifted his eyebrow at Anansi. A set of sand hospital scrubs appeared over his head, and he shook his finger primly as if to say that a scrub was a guy who could get no love from Sandy. Anansi sagged as if deeply disappointed.

Jack felt even more icicles grow on him. Just what he needed - another Guardian who wasn't hesitant to criticize him at the drop of a hat. Jack's relationship with Anansi had been decent after the Africa mission, when they only met up for the occasional tall tale, but their first meeting had been so contentious that any fondness he'd felt towards Anansi was crushed easily by the shards.

"So obviously you're here to singlehandedly save the day by telling us the story of how to get the shards out of North's shoulder and my eyes. How about you get on with that so you can be on your way?" Jack rolled his eyes. _And take your perfect teeth with you, _he added silently.

"Shards?" Anansi repeated, looking over the rims of his sunglasses at Jack. "Is that what's got you looking like a winter waterfall? Because I was wondering -"

"Why is it that Manny did not tell us of your being a Guardian?" North asked, much more skeptical than Bunny.

"Yes, thank you," Jack interjected, crossing his arms. "If you're really a Guardian, why didn't Manny tell everyone?"

"That," said Anansi, pointing at them with an approving swagger, "is a _very_ good question. And a _very_ long story when we have _very _little time to sit around talking. Especially not when the lovely queen of the Tooth Fairy armies still has a wound to be treated." He flashed his gleaming smile at Tooth again. To Jack's horror, she giggled. Jack was not at all fond of the way Tooth and Anansi seemed so familiar.

"Anansi, if it's true that you're a Guardian, you really should have told us sooner. This isn't something you can just charm your way out of." But she sounded plenty charmed, and not nearly as confused or indignant as Jack thought they all should have.

"I had a clue," Bunny inserted, dryly. "He's been dropping hints for centuries." Anansi actually looked indignant, but Bunny went on. "He's got a point though. We don't have a lot of time to throw around. What about these shards anyway, mate? Pieces of the Snow Queen's mirror - how do we go about getting rid of them?"

Anansi shrugged. "I'unno."

As one, all the Guardians went, "_What_?"

"Oh this better be a joke you arrogant nong, _do _get to the punchline."

"This isn't funny, Anansi," said Jack. "We were really counting on you to give us a straight answer."

"And counting on a trickster is _always _a solid plan," said Anansi, with a trace of amusement.

"You know, I think I can guess why Manny never told anyone you were a Guardian," Jack snapped, his staff creaking beneath his grip. "He must've realized right after appointing you how bad you'd be at it."

Anansi's eyes narrowed slightly. It seemed his exoskeleton wasn't without its chinks. "At least he chose me for my skill and not because of my inability to swim."

The spider myth seemed to regret his words as soon as he'd spoken them, but it was already too late. Jack's mouth dropped open in shock. He still hadn't told them he'd died. He'd insinuated he saved his sister and woken up in the pond but for all they know it had been some strange, magical transformation.

The other Guardians glared at Anansi with open-mouthed disapproval.

"Anansi." Tooth's voice was as cold and sharp as the sword in her hand. "Stop it."

Anansi lifted his hands (and his eight handless legs) in a gesture of surrender. "Yes. My bad. But to answer your question - _I _do not know how to fix the shards in your shoulder," he nodded to North, who was glaring stonily after Anansi's jab at Jack, "or your eyes." He turned to Jack. "Not all stories are preserved forever. Sometimes time changes them, or loses them entirely and my webs are fickle in what they catch. What I do know is this - there is one story of a child pierced by the Snow Queen's mirror shards that ends happily, but only one. A child named Gerda once saved her friend Kai, but for now, I cannot tell you how she did it. But I might know someone who can." He nodded to Tooth. "And if we go now, she can do better for that scratch than any remedy that grows on this Earth. I have spoken to the Man in the Moon, and he has spoken to her. We are assured she will come to greet us."

Bunny had already lifted his foot to stamp open a tunnel. "I need a destination here, mate."

"South," answered Anansi, just as a howl filtered faintly towards them on the wind. "and East. We go to see the Mother Whose Children are Like Fish."

* * *

The beach at Matheson Hammock Park inscribed a gentle crescent against the lake-smooth ocean. The Guardians stood at the edge of the water, where the child-sized waves lapped at the shore with a noise like a lullabye. The crisp, just-above-freezing temperature had cleared the sky of south Florida's humid haze, and the sky was unusually full of stars. A waxing gibbous moon hung over the blue water, its reflection on the sea a long silver path that seemed to reach from the horizon all the way to the shore, where many children's footprints still imprinted the soft white sand.

Jack couldn't see any of the beauty in this, but it was there for the others to breathe out in relief over, a moment of quiet that was almost approaching warmth.

"She has a cult nearby," said Anansi, nodding his head inland, where the lights of Miami blotted out the stars. "The children of the city still know her, though many have never been taught her name. She takes them into her arms in moments of trouble, and they love her for it."

"Maybe it's the shards in my eyes, but I sure don't see any mothers." Jack shifted uncomfortably on the sand, which scraped his bare feet like sharp rocks. The stars pricked through the blanket of night like someone's very drunk attempt at needlepoint. "Or children who are like fish. We're not going swimming, are we?"

"Relax, Frost Spirit," Anansi said, peering over the water. "Enjoy the weather. Your icicles are almost melting. She'll be here. Manny said -"

"Manny sure seems to speak to you a lot," Jack groused, as the others stood silently by at the edge of the waves. "A whole lot more than he speaks to any of us."

"Maybe I'm his favorite." Anansi grinned.

Jack glowered, but before he could say anything else, the light of the moon overheard grew suddenly brighter, shining down on them like a spotlight. North stepped forward into the light.

"Manny! Your timing is impeccable. We are in dire need of your guidance. Anansi says that he is a Guardian. Is this true?"

The light focused into an even tighter circle in the sand and a group of shadows appeared in the circle, silhouettes that clearly represented the five Guardians. Another shadow appeared proudly among their number, one that was exceedingly spidery.

"So is true. How about that?" said North, raising his eyebrows.

"_Maybe_," put in Jack. "Maybe he just means we should team up with him for now."

The shadow of Anansi was shoved closer to the Guardians, as if to emphasize, "No, he's one of you." Jack sulked, crossing his arms and looking away.

Then the spotlight moved away and out to sea, beaming down to the point on the horizon where the moon's reflection became a long trail glittering on the water.

A figure walked towards them on the path made by the moonlight. At least, it seemed like she walked - as she drew closer, they realized she was flowing across the surface of the water. Her blue and white dress disappeared into the ocean, and seemed not to be a dress at all, but as if the water and foam had flowed up to clothe her. Her black skin gleamed, reflecting the moonlight as brightly as if she were made of polished marble. Her hair poured from her scalp like a fountain, trailing in the water, silver as the moon.

She_ gleamed_. Even to they who had seen so much that was beautiful, so much that was majestic that mortals would never see, she was impossibly radiant.

"Yemaja Ashaba," said Anansi, his voice warm with appreciation. "So beautiful that no human can look directly upon her. How lucky we are just now not to be human "

To Jack's sharded eyes, she was merely pretty - but even that was a balm to his vision compared to how nasty everything else looked. His pained eyes drank the sight of her in.

Even so, bitterness burned in Jack's heart and the dark mood that had overtaken him twisted everything beautiful into something ugly. It damped his hope and turned it into cynicism.

"The Mother Whose Children are Like Fish, huh? Is that 'cause they're smelly like fish, or because their faces look like this?" Jack pursed his lips and sucked in his cheeks, making a fishy sort of face.

It turned respect and kindness into childish sarcasm, too, apparently.

She looked at him with indulgence in her dark eyes. When his vision met hers, for a sudden instant he was no longer in South Florida and he was no longer cold; he was in Burgess, and he was warm, and he was a small child curled in a woman's gentle arms. He saw her face, human, mortal, and somehow still illuminated with a spark of Yemaja's impossible radiance.

He saw his mother again, after three hundred years of missing her - without remembering her - and felt her love.

He bit back an awestruck sob, and realized that much of the ice on him was falling away, dripping to the sand as water. The moment he noticed, though, it froze again, but even so he was noticeably lighter than when he had first looked into Yemaja's eyes.

"A mother knows what lies behind a 'stupid expression'," she said, and even her voice reminded him of Burgess lullabies. "Little son."

She gave him one more comforting smile, the Mother whose children were, like fish, too numerous to count. The ice on Jack thawed a little more as he felt, deep down, that he was in some way one of them.

"And to you, brother Spider," she said, turning her gaze on Anansi. He grinned eagerly, like a child awaiting ice cream. "The Man in the Moon says to tell you you are _not _his favorite."

Some more ice trickled off Jack as he laughed; Anansi sagged - again - with disappointment.


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: **To make up for the long delay, we gave you a pretty long chapter. Enjoy! (Just like we'll be enjoying your sad feelings.)

* * *

**To the reviewers that said they were dying without an update: **Be careful what you wish for since this update will make you die a little inside, too, probably.

**FjordMustang**: Aaah, you are so attentive to detail. All of those things you listed were things we very purposefully made use of in the story. And yes, like Anansi, Yemaya already exists in real-world folklore and is probably the goddess you've heard of. She has a small cult-like following among children in the ghetto of cities like Miami and we felt a myth figure like that fit well into the universe. We're also glad that you liked how we had North and Jack fight the despair. We feel they both are the types to keep fighting no matter how dark it seems.

**feathered moon wings: **The three of us find cowriting to be fairly easy. It usually works with the three of us plotting together and creating a chapter-by-chapter outline to work off of for the story. I usually handle the basic plot with the others hammering it into a more complex shape. Then Anders and I write out a lot of stuff, working off each other in gdocs on parts we have trouble with, usually with one of us handling one character and the other handling another (I'm good at Jack, she's good at Bunny and we alternate on the others, with Kaylin helping with North when Anders and I are stuck on him). Then Kaylin swoops in like some story-writing Superwoman and adds in some really funny and touching moments and makes our stuff even better and funnier. Anders and I do the bulk of the writing, but a lot of really funny lines, clever bits, and character moments (like Jack's fish face) are all her. We usually yank her in when we're stuck somewhere.

For the most part, we're all so enamored of each other's brains, we rarely argue over what should happen next and just kind of egg each other on constantly to make things more interesting. If we do disagree, we either pick one person's take of what they think would be best for the scene if it seems the best, merge our ideas of a scene, or drop both ideas and try to come up with something better than both. We also make lots of butt jokes. That's about 95% of the writing process, butt jokes.

Really, I think that's why it's so easy to work together. It's fun and we joke around instead of any of us letting our egos or what we think is best getting in the way. Also, because of the butt jokes.

**Rugiku**: Yep, Anansi and Yemaya are characters from folklore/mythology. If you pull them up on wikipedia and wiki-walk you might find some interesting stuff. We felt the movie focused a little too exclusively on western folklore when it's a big, wide world out there so we wanted to work in folklore figures from around the world into the story and into the main team to make it feel like it had even more of a global scope.

* * *

**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders, Kaylin, and Saph

* * *

**Chapter 6**

Yemaja drew into the shallows, where it became clear how she had moved so smoothly across the water. Her lower body became a long, silvery fishtail that trailed behind her, and when she reached the shore, she drew her tail up beneath her in a coil to rest on. She lifted her hand to beckon them in, the silver fan of her tail flashing in and out of the water.

They all stepped into the sea - even Tooth and Sandy. The cold water warmed as they drew close to her. Anansi was the first to bow. The others followed, and when Jack knelt, he felt the submerged ice on his body beginning to melt in the warm water. He had never been a fan of swimming, but now, he fought the urge to fling his whole freezing body into the child-sized waves.

"Yey Omo Eja," said Anansi, who, being the first to bow, was also the first to rise. "My fellow Guardians have come for your wisdom, and your healing."

"And you will have both," she said, overlooking the group, her smile brightening as she saw that Tooth held a small bundle in her hands. "Even in this time of haste, you thought to bring me gifts!"

She sounded as much like a mother pleased at a child's good manners as any of them could remember.

"It's not much," said Tooth, looking humbler than Jack had ever seen her as she held out her offering - several of her long, lovely feathers, shaded from turquoise to violet-edged indigo, plucked carefully from her train. Yemaja took them graciously.

"Feathers from the Queen of the Tooth Fairy Army's own tail, not much?" she repeated, as she wove the feathers artfully into her silver hair. "I know better than that. Only one other spirit wears these - and now, so do I. Truly, a gift beyond compare." She drew Tooth in to stand at her side, and swept her hair behind her shoulder so that the feathers in them caught the moonlight as she and Tooth stood side by side. "Well, my sons? Do we match? Are we beautiful together?"

"Like pearls in shell of abalone," North declared. A little bit of color had come back to his ashen cheeks, and he leaned, his sharded shoulder closer to the water than his other. "Prettier than picture."

Tooth touched her own face bashfully as Yemaja took her hand, loosening the coils of her tail to rest lower, at Tooth's eye level. "While I have you here, little Queen, let's see what I can do for that arm."

"Thank you," said Tooth, holding out her arm, which was scabbed over and looked puffy at the edges. She hadn't complained, of course, but it was obvious to Jack now that the wound could indeed have gotten worse if they'd left it alone for too much longer.

Yemaja dipped her hand in the seawater and poured it, sparkling silver, over Tooth's arm. Tooth winced, but did not object as Yemaja continued to bathe the wound. "As for the rest of you," she said, not looking up from Tooth's arm - "Your wounds escape the ability of the sea to heal, but if you bathe in my waters, you may feel some relief."

North didn't need any further encouragement, shrugging out of his coat to lie in the shallow water. He sighed with relief as the waves washed over his shoulder, and even chuckled with soft, childlike laughter as he floated his hands on the shifting surface of the water.

"Beach day!" he declared. "Perhaps is something we have all been missing. Maybe after all this is over, when Pole is rebuilt, we all take day off, find deserted island, have day of fun and sun, yes? Perfect way to recharge after all this cold and this ice." He put his hands behind his head, sighing with relaxation.

"That sounds great," said Jack, admittedly without his usual enthusiasm, but still, he sat in the water, feeling reassured by North's return to joviality. He did not want to put his face in the water, so he filled his palms with seawater to press to his eyes, but the water had already frozen solid by the time he brought it to his face.

"With all due respect," said Bunny, "we need a little more than pain relief for these two. Anansi said you knew - something?"

Yemaja looked at him with a patient smile. "Oh don't you worry yourself, Bunnymund. I have the advice you came for."

She released Tooth's arm, and Tooth looked at it with surprise, having not noticed the wound closing over in the seawater, the bare new bright pink skin stark in the midst of her feathers.

"There you go, pretty warrior queen," said Yemaja, and she lifted her hand to gently pet the feathers at Tooth's temples, as if she were her own daughter. "Your fine feathers will grow in, as good as new. You won't even see the scar."

Tooth's face split into a beautiful grin, and she couldn't resist leaning in to hug Yemaja.

It was strange to see Tooth - so motherly herself - being mothered by another. It made Jack wonder if she'd had a mother - she had to have, right? She'd had a life before becoming a Guardian and a life meant family, unless she'd magically sprung out of the air. Jack wondered what had become of her mother and if Tooth missed her. Even though she was old, much older than him, she had changed into a myth young like he had. It was hard to tell how young when she wasn't human, but Jack was fairly sure she hadn't been much older than him.

Tooth stepped back, smiling, in line with Sandy, Anansi, and Bunny. North still floated happily in the water, splashing at the surface and humming a little tune. Yemaja reached over and touched her hand to his shoulder, smiling as he exhaled in further relief.

"It may be temporary," he said, sounding not at all bothered by that possibility - "but relief? It is definitely that."

"If I could take your pain from you, I would," she said, her voice tender, and the shards could find nothing in her sentiment to make evil.

"Please," said Bunny, stepping closer again. "We don't have a lot of time."

Those words, the shards twisted easily.

"Bored already?" Jack asked, as he bent forward to dip his face in the water for some of the relief North was feeling. Seawater rushed in his ears and covered his face, and for a blessed moment, the shards did not cut. Jack breathed out in relief.

"I smell it coming," Bunny said. He didn't have to explain what "it" was. Jack stood up in the water. "It's far, but it's gaining -"

"In that case," said Yemaja, rising on her tail again, helping North up, and looking Jack in the eye - "Here is my advice: Only love will save you now."

Jack blinked.

"Well," he said, "Thank you for the advice – the vague, saccharine advice - but if that's all you got for us, I think we could have gone to Brisney World and gotten more or less the same."

Yemaja held one finger to his nose, like a mother admonishing one of her very own children.

"My advice isn't over, little son. The story is lost, along with the Snow Queen, and so I cannot tell it to you, but the point of that story –" she eyed Anansi – "the point of so many stories – is that there is only one thing that can undo the work of the wicked. That is love. Other things may soothe its effects, but love alone can heal. However, there are other things that must happen first to prepare the way for love to undo the work of wickedness."

She took Jack's hand.

"The greatest power of evil, I am sad to say, is that the wounds it inflicts can carry on its work even through our heroes. But though wounds may run deep –", and as she took Jack's hand, she took Bunny's as well – "fortunately for the inflicted, there are few that can be delivered between the good of heart which cannot be overcome by honesty, openness, followed by forgiveness, friendship – and the love which will restore the cycles of the world."

Bunny and Jack looked at each other, and each jerked their hands out of Yemaja's.

"Ah, Sheila, with respect, I think you haven't been paying attention to the last 300 years."

"What he said. He hates me. That's not exactly conducive to friendship, much less love."

"Jack, mate," Bunny interjected softly, "I don't hate you."

"Oh you don't?" Jack scoffed. "Well silly me for getting that impression. Have _you_ been paying attention the last 300 years? It might have taken a while, but I got the message. Loud and clear."

Yemaja took Jack's hand again, and he rolled his eyes. He wanted to leave, but he didn't want to pull his hand out of Yemaja's. Where she touched him, the ice dripping from his skin turned to water and flowed away. He wanted to move her hands near his eyes, hoping her touch would melt the shards, even if only for a moment.

"You came all this way to me for advice," she said, taking Bunny's paw as well. "So I will give it, whether you find it easy to hear or not. Spring needs winter," she said.

"No," she insisted, when Bunny frowned with disbelief. "It does."

He breathed in indignantly, but listened in silence. Yemaja smiled at him with approval.

"It needs the snow that melts into the creeks and fills the aquifers. It needs the freeze that breaks down the old growth, so that the new can rise from it. Without winter, spring would starve. Without winter, spring would have nothing to fuel the rebirth it brings."

"And winter," she said, turning to Jack, "Must concede to spring. Because without spring, winter would be too inhospitable to be fun. It is true," she said, as Jack rolled his eyes. "You have seen the side of winter that does not concede, that is not concerned with whether or not a child can pack a snowball out of the freshly fallen snow. That is not your winter, and it is not the winter the world needs. The world needs the winter that brings rest. That re-creates." Her eyes shone as she smiled. "That brings_ recreation_. But in order to bring rest, winter must have something to bring rest to – and when the time is right, must allow what it has rejuvenated with snow, and with sleep, to wake up.

"That balance will save the world," she said, looking at them both with equal affection and gravity, "But only love will save you now."

Jack jerked his hand from Yemaja's and stomped away, his shoulders hunched, his back bent.

"Jack!" Tooth called, fluttering after him.

Sandy and North followed her, clearly concerned that Jack might do something more rash than just stomping off. Anansi followed, but not immediately, pausing to raise an eyebrow at Bunny. He crept after the other Guardians, leaving Bunny and Yemaja at the water's edge.

The Mother waited in silence as Bunny turned to her with a sigh.

"Your...wateriness, with respect, if this is the only solution you've got, I don't –"

"Don't see much hope in your future?" Yemaja quirked an eyebrow. "_You_ do not?"

Bunny faltered, silently, not wanting to admit hopelessness in any situation.

"I haven't exactly, ah – promoted it," he admitted, softly. "In this case."

"Then you have some very difficult work to do," Yemaja said. "Don't you, my little son?"

He looked stricken at her for a moment – then bowed his head in deep concession.

Yemaja laid her hand between his ears, and he only flinched a little at her unexpected touch.

"This will not be easy work," she said. "But after all, it is _your_ work, Guardian of Hope. Who else could do it, in a moment when hope is so hard to come by?"

A howl echoed down from the north. They all froze, hearing it even over the noise of the ocean and the nearby city.

"Go," said Yemaja, her smiling face suddenly stern. "Across the sea. But rest, when you can. It's important not to forget that. And you will have time -" her eyes flashed in the moonlight. "Passage to the islands will grow difficult soon - the sea is about to become...rough."

Bunny stamped the beach open.

"Go go go!" he shouted, waving them through. One by one the Guardians disappeared into the tunnel, each with a farewell thank you to Yemaja (though Jack's might have been a little softer than perhaps was entirely polite). Jack seemed reluctant to leave her presence, though, and Bunny could tell from the expression on the frost spirit's face that the reprieve in his pain hadn't given him a reprieve from hopelessness.

Yemaja said a single word that stopped Bunny before he jumped through after the others.

"Pull the thorn from your heart," she said, "and there will be blood. But the wound will be free to close."

The wolf howled from the other side of the city. The look Bunny gave Yemaja as he nodded and dropped into the tunnel was fearful - but to a Mother, who knew what lay beyond mere outward expression, it was clear the wolf was not what he feared this time.

* * *

The wind had picked up when they emerged on a small coral island, barely more than a cave on the sea. The stars were overshadowed by clouds and the waves beat rough against the ragged-edged coral rock.

"Hoo," North said, pulling off his coat and wringing it closer to dry. "Now that we are away from the Mother's care, soaking ourselves in the water seems not so much a good idea." He smiled ruefully as a couple tendrils of dreamsand plucked the coat from his hands and wrung it out for him. "But that is always the way of beautiful women, hmm? Things that seemed clever then seem less clever later."

"Already working on the fire," Bunny said, crouched midway back into the cave. "Not much fuel to scrounge for around here, but I brought some from the mainland."

The Guardians drew in close as the tiny flame grew to a small fire. Sandy conjured a wall of dreamsand behind it, blocking much of the wind out and reflecting the heat back to them. Anansi prodded the wall experimentally before deciding it was sturdy enough to support his weight. Jack wished vindictively that Sandy would shift it just enough to let Anansi fall over, but the second oldest Guardian just rolled his eyes at the eldest.

"So," Anansi said, once he was comfortable. "Now to consider what we know."

"And you must tell us _all_ you know," said North, arching an eyebrow at Anansi.

"All I knew from the stories I caught in my webs was that it was time to involve myself directly and take you to Ye Omo Eja. In terms of knowledge," he raised his human hands, and two of his spiders legs innocently, "I am all tapped out. I am not even sure how Yemaja knows what she knows, if the story truly is lost. The Snow Queen had powerful enchantments around her ice palace to keep out prying eyes, and perhaps Yemaja saw inside using her power over the water that made the ice. But if she knows the story, then the only reason she would be so vague is if telling us a direct answer would make finding the right course of action impossible. Regardless, she spoke the truth - a great many stories are ultimately about the power of love. That which it does not cure, it makes bearable; but for beings like us, who don't suffer the ills of average mortals, it cures an awful lot."

"It can't be that easy," Tooth protested, accompanied by Sandy's vigorous nodding. "If loving people was the only thing needed to protect them from the shards, they wouldn't be a problem."

"Very true," Anansi agreed. "An action needs to be taken or a sacrifice made." He tossed an inscrutable look in Bunny's direction. "We just have to herd this story along and figure out what that might be."

Bunny, hunkered down at the edge of the firelight, didn't contribute to the conversation.

"I think we all agree, this story has enough of tragedy already," said North, as he shifted his shoulder closer to the fire. "So, we must talk actions! Action is more likely than sacrifice I think; love is not a sacrifice. Love, she is better than that."

"I'm not talking about trading your voice for legs, you ninny, I'm talking about - WOOFT!"

The sandwall behind Anansi had very suddenly bulged outward at Sandy's behest, sending the Spider sprawling under his own weight and everyone's glares. "...I rescind the insult," he said, almost meekly. "May I sit up again?"

"You may sit," North said magnanimously. Sandy waved the wall back into shape and Anansi shifted to his two human feet, pouting a bit.

"As I was saying, if there is a sacrifice, it doesn't necessarily have to be permanent. Putting ourselves through some physical and emotional discomfort should do as proof, and after all of the snow I've slogged through, we should at least be halfway there."

It was sudden and startling when Jack reacted, but away from the protective influence of Yemaya, the waves of hatred that were slamming into him one by one like the waves of her beach were overwhelming. Out there in the world, the Old Man was wreaking havoc as they all spoke.

And here they all were talking about something that just couldn't be.

No one would love him the way that was necessary to stop the shards. No one would make that kind of sacrifice for him, and if Yemaya was right that it had to be Bunny, he was as good as dead.

Abruptly just too tired to listen to any more of their useless prattling, Jack punched the stone wall hard enough to leave his knuckles bleeding.

"What's the point?" he asked. His voice cracked with weariness and misery. "You keep talking, like - like there's a way out of this if everyone stands around chit-chatting enough. Like we have any chance at all. He's won. That's it, game over. We might as just - just dig a grave for North and me - no, scratch that, sorry, just for me, because love -" he wiggled his bloody fingers "- is the magic cure-all and at least you all love him. Anyway, we might as well dig a grave for me and move everyone to the equator, because that's it. We're done."

"Jack, you're not -" Tooth started, fluttering towards him, looking concerned.

Now he was so far gone that he shoved her away. "Don't. Don't talk to me. Don't - just -" He shook his head. "I get it. I get it all now. What happened to my eyes isn't a curse. It's given me _clarity_. I can see the truth now and the truth is everything is horrible. You're all horrible, _I'm _horrible, everything - everyone is ugly, and all we have are stupid lies and platitudes to try to - to convince ourselves the world isn't that way, but it is."

He'd been a fly on the wall to the worst of human existence for so many years, and until the shards, he'd been able to put them at the back of his mind in favor of a snowball fight. The people he had wanted so badly to see him were so good at hurting each other, at making life more difficult for each other to live, and all the times observing that had come close to breaking him - maybe he would have been better off if he'd broken and gone cold long ago.

And this strange way of existing he'd done for three hundred years - this being a whisper on the wind, a spirit who was given new life by the Man in the Moon - this was horrible, too. It was a false rescue, his rebirth from the pond, from which he'd wandered for 300 years without guidance, without friendship, only to have Manny dangle a carrot of purpose and belonging in front of his face long enough for him to die with the understanding of just what a waste his second life had been.

Jack turned to the back of the cave. The blood dripped down his arm, staining his sleeve, but he didn't notice. "So, go do whatever it is you need to do to convince yourselves that you tried your best. I'll be in there dying like I should have done three hundred years ago."

He turned on his heel and walked deeper into the cave, where the path twisted out of sight, not caring to leave them with better last words.

The Guardians sat in silence, but for the whistling of the wind and the sound of waves. North lifted his hand to his shoulder in an almost unconscious gesture of pain. Beside him, Sandy put a hand on his good arm, but no sand pictograms flashed his thoughts for the others to see.

Tooth looked at Bunny, her expression entreating. Bunny held her gaze for a moment, then closed his eyes with a sigh.

"It is always harder to judge a story when you are in the middle of it," Anansi spoke up, from where he was sitting with his fingers laced together. "But I would say this story has reached a crossroads."

Bunny stood up and left the Guardians, following Jack deeper into the cave.

* * *

Jack slumped against the calcified coral, lying there without enough care for his own misery to draw them up to his chin. There was going to be no curling up in a ball for Jack Frost, oh no. He would die sprawled out with no regard for dignity in death.

He examined his bleeding hand, watching the blood frost over. He was so numb now from the cold that he didn't even feel the injury. His whole body was frosted, hair weighed down with icicles, cheeks caked with ice. His breath came in little puffs of fog. The hand he wasn't looking at clutched at his chest over his heart.

When he heard footsteps approaching, he didn't even bother to look up. He spoke, his voice cold and hollow rather than angry.

"Go away."

When he looked up and saw that it was Bunny, his expression darkened. "_You_ can _especially_ go away. I never want to talk to you again."

Never wasn't a very long time in this case. Jack felt the ice digging deeper, touching his heart. He didn't have long. If he hadn't been so numb, that thought would have frightened him.

"I know." Bunny crouched down, but didn't sit comfortably, resting on the balls of his feet. "But I have to tell you something. Something that might give you a long 'never' to not talk to me in."

"Oooh, of course. Gotta play the hero. Gotta at least tryyyyy." Jack drew the word in a way that made it sound like he was stretching it out with a rope and then using that rope to strangle it. "After all, you guys need me, right? In case Pitch comes back - can't let the Man in the Moon's hand-picked scab go without a fight. Wonder who Manny'll pick to replace me after I'm gone. Is he gonna ignore them for 300 years, too?" He chuckled darkly. "Or maybe he never ignored me. Maybe he's been laughing that whole time, and now he's ready for the last laugh."

Jack laughed but there was no warmth in it. He looked towards Bunny with a quick tilt of his head, with eyes that were too light, closer to gray than blue now. "Tooth guilted you into this, right? It's not like you actually care - you never cared - so it has to be guilt."

Bunny crouched in silence for a moment, and looked away from Jack's gaze. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. "You're right. It is guilt. I've done a lot wrong by you. So I owe you this, at least. I owe it to you to bring you hope."

Jack laughed once. "Are you serious?" He laughed again, mocking, harsh laughter that stabbed at the air like icicles. Even his puffs of breath looked rough at the edges. "You're here to bring me hope. You. _Now_. Oh, that's rich. That's really, really rich, after all this - all these years of bringing hope to everyone but _me - _"

His laughter continued, but it was starting to sound more like sobs.

"It's funny," he said, as his harsh laughter petered out, "because you think you _can._" Icicles built at the corners of Jack's eyes, where tears would have flowed - if there had been any warmth left in him to let them flow. He observed Bunny staring at the ground, unmoving, with a numbness that was almost a relief, after all this pain - and after all the sharp vindictiveness that had been stabbing at him since Bunny accused him of murder at the Pole.

Or maybe even before - when Bunny first refused, at the same Pole, to accept him as a possible Guardian.

"After all the times _you've_ made me feel hopeless."

Bunny didn't respond, crouched, unmoving, staring at the ground with a glimmer in the corners of his eyes, but when he looked up again, steeling himself with a breath, his expression was only set with seriousness.

"This will bring you hope," he said, finally, still quiet. "Old Man Winter can be defeated. He was once. And I can tell you how."

Jack rolled his eyes, and leaned his head back against the stone. "You know, I might believe that, if anyone was doing what it takes to defeat him right now. But hey, I've got a minute or two before I freeze to death - go ahead and say whatever you want to make yourself feel better."

"It's not going to." Bunny heaved a deep sigh, and there was almost a note of bitterness in his voice.

"Sure it won't," Jack muttered, the bitterness in his voice as biting as the cold nipping its way to his heart. Bunny would say what he needed to say to assuage his sense of obligation, and go about his business able to say to himself that he had done everything he could have done - regardless of whether or not it was true.

"Old Man Winter can be defeated," Bunny repeated, sinking from his crouch to kneel. "And even though things look hopeless right now, they're not - because someone else already defeated Old Man Winter once before when things looked just as hopeless."

"Oh yeah?" Jack asked, thinking of some summer spirit, all rage and fire where Jokul Frosti was rage and ice. "Who defeated him? Why exactly haven't they come forward yet? Why haven't we gone to them?"

"Because it's me," Bunny said, simply. "I defeated Old Man Winter. A long time ago."

Jack froze for a moment. Then he narrowed his eyes, anger welling up.

"Oh yeah, I can really see it in the way you've whipped him straight into shape already. It's not like he's more powerful than all of us put together or anything. Don't worry everyone, the great Easter Bunny is on the case – clearly he's just taking his time because he_ likes _getting to blame everyone else for people dying."

But at the same time, Jack had to admit - of all the Guardians, only Bunny had gotten in a good solid blow on Old Man Winter. Perhaps that strike with the boomerang had only been a lucky fluke, but it had cut the old man deep, and it had left a wound the others' weapons hadn't.

"That's part of the story," said Bunny, building steam as he carried his tale on. "It's not as simple as getting a good one in on the old nong. I never would have been able to do it if the others hadn't been keeping him busy at the time."

"The others?"

Bunny nodded to back in the direction of the front of the cave. "The Guardians. I wasn't one yet. I wasn't –" he paused, sighed as he thought his words through, then gestured largely to his six-foot-one frame. "_Myself_ yet."

Jack snorted.

"Now I _know_ you're lying. Tiny, fluffy Bunny couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag, much less put a dent in Old Man Winter."

"It wasn't in battle. It was...indirect."

"Well spit it out, Cottontail," Jack snapped venomously. "If you're going to tell a lie, at least tell it straight. And hurry it up, will you? Some of us are trying to die quietly back here."

Bunny looked at the ground again. "It's not an easy story for me to tell."

"Why, forget your facts after a couple of hundred of years or so? Maybe if we go back to the Warren, you can find where you wrote them down on a rock so they'd be an eternal testament to how much better you think you are than the rest of us."

Jack said "the rest of us" but those words clearly stood in for "me."

"It goes back ages ago," Bunny went on. "Back when Old Man Winter wasn't so ambitious. When Easter was still Eostre, when the Easter Bunny didn't exist because there wasn't _an_ Easter Bunny." He closed his eyes, like someone stealing himself to leap over a precipice. "There were hundreds."

He looked up at Jack, and his eyes were visibly wet.

"I never wore goggles, Jack. Or a lab coat."

Understanding hit Jack like a snowball with a rock in it.

The self-portraits he'd seen in the Warren weren't self-portraits, after all. Bunny's fury over Jack making fun of them made sense now. It was like Jack had mocked photographs of a dead relative.

No, hundreds of dead relatives.

Jack saw, for a moment, a little more clearly, the cave less washed-out, the lichen on the coral walls a little less grey. He asked, "What happened to them?"

"Old Man Winter," said Bunny, his eyes narrowed to slits, his voice weighted with sorrow and anger - "happened."

He paused again, and in the pause, other things began to make sense to Jack. Their first meeting, so long ago, when Bunny had reacted without a single ounce of humor to Jack's playful attempt to carry on winter. The many times he had continued not to play along when Jack pranked him on the cusp of winter becoming spring. The grudge over the snowed-out Easter.

"It was a deep winter in the north," Bunny went on. "A cold summer night in the outback. I was the only one out when –" he closed his eyes briefly. "When Old Man Winter decided it was high time winter never ended. And to keep winter going forever, he thought, 'why not kill spring at its source?'" He paused, breathing again. "I was the only one outside the Warren. So I was the only one not frozen to death when he struck."

He fell into silence again, his eyes distant.

Jack could only sit in silence, picking apart a three-hundred year rivalry with an entirely new understanding.

Bunny went on, "For a while, I couldn't tell if Old Man Winter had succeeded, if spring could come again or not. The Warren was -" he shook his head, as if deciding that he did not even want to begin describing what the Warren was after Old Man Winter's attack. "If you want the full story, you can ask Anansi. I can't do it justice and frankly I don't want to be able to. But the point is, if ever a situation had seemed hopeless, that was it. Winter had its fingers in deep, long after it should have left. That's what got the Guardians' attention. By the time they came by to investigate, the vernal equinox had come and gone and winter showed no signs of letting up. I'd gotten most of the Warren cleared but it was – it was not looking good."

Once upon a time, Jack would have been moved by all this, and maybe, deep down inside, a part of him still was.

But winter had come again, and the cold had taken over. If there were any parts of him left that were compassionate, they were buried deep under the ice.

"At least it was quick," he said, distantly. "It sounds quick. They were lucky. You just weren't there. Nothing you could do about it." He rolled his eyes away from the lichen-covered wall to look at Bunny. "They didn't die because you hated them."

Bunny breathed in sharply, and for a moment his paws clenched as if he wanted to lash out, but he only looked Jack directly in the eye.

"Frost, I've been wrong about you for a long time, and part of what I had wrong was thinking you could be cruel. I know better now. It may have taken too long, but I know better now. The shards are talking for you. Stop letting them. You don't owe me any kindness, but they shouldn't have control over anyone, much less you."

Jack had to take a moment to consider this, bright eyes wide, fog drifting up out of his mouth with each breath.

"You're just saying whatever you need to," he accused. "To give me hope. Because the Guardians need me, and you still think hope is powerful enough to stop this."

"Because it is. It_ did_," Bunny insisted, with sudden conviction. "If you take nothing else from this, understand that. Old Man Winter knew that without hope, people would fall to him like flies. He attacked the Warren to take away their hope for spring. And he almost managed."

He looked away again, like his past was playing out in pictures on the stone wall. "People were dying. Winter stores were all but used up. There was so little hope left that the Warren was barely alive, and I could only do little things. A couple of eggs to a family who was starving. A crocus peeking through the snow by a farmhouse. If Old Man Winter had seen a single one of the signs I left, he would have come back to the Warren to finish the job -" he shook his head. "But he didn't see. He was too busy gloating - when he wasn't too busy fighting the Guardians. I could never have done it without them." His expression warmed just slightly. "But more than that - I couldn't have done it without the children. They saw the signs and they believed. They were starving, freezing, but they saw their gifts, and they believed that winter would end. It gave them _hope - _and hope gave them strength."

He paused, with a very small smile, that was full of admiration for those children, hoping when hope was only a tiny thing peeking through the snow.

"It gave me strength, too. They believed I could do the work of a thousand - and so I could do it. That's why Old Man Winter went to sleep. Because in spite of all his efforts, all the children needed was that little spark of hope to keep on believing that spring would come again - and that little spark kept them holding on long enough that spring _could_ come again."

"I don't see how this is supposed to save me," Jack said, but his voice was not a knife anymore - it was plaintive and soft. "There's no hope for me anymore."

"Yeah there is," said Bunny, with calm solidity. "It's all you need. It wasn't the spring that put Old Man Winter to sleep, it was the hope. Old Man Winter is all about folks lying down and giving up - hope is about not needing to. Hope is what lets you _endure. _It keeps you putting one foot in front of the other, even when the storm is raging all around you. The longer you hold on to hope, the longer you'll be able to resist the shards. The longer you hold on, the longer we have to figure out how to save you - and you have to hope, because Yemaja's right. The world needs your winter, more than it _doesn't _need his winter. It needs to know how to laugh in the face of danger. It needs to have something to look forward to while the year turns dark. Maybe I couldn't see it, but there's a world full of kids who already did. And they need you to hold onto hope now more than anything - they need to you to see it's still there for you to hang on to."

Jack closed his eyes tight, as if he hadn't heard a word. "Stop talking like this."

But a tear leaked from the corners of his eyes. A liquid tear, that didn't freeze until it had made it almost all the way down his face.

Bunny saw the tear, though, and watched it. "See? There's a start. Something thawed in there. You've got to let this out rather than going cold." Jack's brief, tiny thaw made him smile triumphantly, but his smile faded in the face of how dire the situation still was. "I'm not asking you to forgive me," he went on. "You don't owe me that. But please believe I don't want you to die."

"But you do!" Jack finally exploded, rounding Bunny, looking close to launching himself after him and beating him with his fists. But this rage wasn't cold - it was fueled by hot anger. The tears kept spilling. Some even dripped from his face to the cave floor. "You hate me! You've always hated me!"

"I never did," said Bunny, almost too softly for anyone without rabbit ears to hear.

"I was afraid," he said steeling his own resolve. "Afraid you'd get ambitious. Afraid you wouldn't care and that someone would get hurt over it. It was stupid of me but I -" he paused. "I wasn't thinking straight. Even when I knew you weren't - that you and Old Man Winter were different stories. I've been scared stupid ever since you showed up, and I'm sorry. I know you have no reason to believe it. But I am," he paused, sighing, "Sorry." He paused again. "And I'm still afraid. But for you - not of you, Jack."

"Okay, we're talking about hope, right? You want to talk hope? How about?" Jack had to stop, closing his eyes tight. "How about hoping to have someone to talk to after - after so long that I -"

He stopped to collect himself, finally drawing his legs up, gathering the fabric at his knees in his fists. Every movement, every taut gesture was an expression of deep-seated pain. It was as if the shards had cut into some deep infection and all the nastiness, all the sickness lurking under the surface, was bubbling out uncontrollably.

"I would go years," he finally said, barely able to force the words out through a throat grown hoarse. "Years and - and sometimes decades without anyone to talk to. But all I had to do was bring a spring snowfall and there you were..." the tears coursed freely down his face, barely clinging to the ice. "You were annoyed, but you were there. You pranked me back and I laughed and - and I always hoped maybe one day, you'd laugh too. It was stupid to think -"

He looked at Bunny again, his eyes growing bluer and bluer. The icicles melted slowly under the flowing tears. Water dripped from his hair. He felt the pain, and it was sharp, so much sharper, after having been numb to it. But feeling it was buying him time.

"You were the first person that ever talked to me. And - and even though you were annoyed, you were the first one that was ever nice to me. Even before Sandy. You showed me a new place to play. Told me about - about how everything has its time. Like you cared that I learned something new. Like - like you cared."

Jack looked up at the roof of the cave. "That's how pathetic I am. I wanted someone who couldn't stand me to like me. And even after all that, when I finally started hanging out with you guys, I still wanted - you're a good person, and a good Guardian, and you care about the kids _so much, _and I care about the kids, but you hated _me_ - "

Jack reached up and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms.

"- You hated me and then you liked me. And then you didn't like me but still thought I was a good person. And then you hated me again. And between that and everyone thinking I'd sold you all out to Pitch, like that was something I'd do, and you _still_ thinking I'd hurt people, all I can think is 'How long is this going to last? How long's the friendship train going to keep rolling before they all decide to leave you out in the cold again?'"

Even as he said it, even as he saw Bunny looking at him with an expression of every indication that his heart was breaking, even as he absorbed Bunny's message - that hope would slow the shards from killing him - he knew there was none.

Bunny didn't hate him. That much was obvious. Even the shards couldn't do much to twist the fact that he'd bared his deepest, most personal sadness in an attempt to slow Jack's death.

But the cure wasn't a lack of hate.

The shards sliced deeper into his eyes, the pain freezing the little hope in his heart that Bunny had managed to stir up. Old Man Winter had killed everything Bunny loved, ended his entire world, and Jack had unknowingly for 300 years stirred that horror up. No one could ask him to just _get over_ that sort of pain to save Jack's life. Not Tooth, for all their friendship. Not Yemaja, for all her authority. Certainly not him.

So he was that much more surprised when Bunny pulled him into a hug, pressing Jack's frozen face against the thick ruff of fur at his chest.

Jack struggled.

"Get off! Don't -"

But Bunny didn't let go.

"You're just doing this because Yemaja said you had to," Jack hissed, the warmth of Bunny's fur doing nothing to thaw the ice creeping now from Jack's body to his. "Because Tooth asked you." Resentment creeped back into his tone. At this point, the rabbit could at least let him die honestly and with dignity. "You can't _fake_ a cure - you can't fake love just because someone _asked_ you to."

A tremor went through Bunny's body, as if he were repressing a sob - as one might expect from someone who likely had terrible memories of frozen bodies in his arms.

"It's not real," Jack insisted, but his voice turned into a high, mournful sob before his words were done. "It was so long. So long. And he wouldn't tell me why -" He shook his head against Bunny's chest. "You don't go that long and have it all just work out. None of you are going to miss me if I'm gone."

"I would," Bunny insisted, fiercely. "I didn't have any fun in all those years. Not until you showed up."

Jack's face contorted into a terrible grimace against Bunny's fur and, finally, the ice thawed - at least as much as it was going to. The tears he sobbed into Bunny's fur were indistinguishable from the water melting off his hair and face.

Jack wrapped his arms tight around the rabbit, fingers digging into his fur so tightly it was almost painful, clinging with a raw need that had gone unfulfilled for three very long centuries. The pain stabbed more harshly, the shards magnifying his frailties as much as they had magnified his hurt.

Now that the moment had passed, now that the poison thorn had been taken out of his metaphorical paw, he could see how the shards had twisted their arguments and his long-neglected hurts into something that had just nearly destroyed him.

"Everything hurts worse," Jack gasped out, clinging to that measure of clarity even as Bunny tucked him into a closer embrace and the shards dug vindictively into his eyes. "Everything - the only thing that stops the pain is going numb, but then I can feel my heart - "

"Icing up."

"Yeah."

"We've got to keep your heart from going cold." Bunny looked up, pausing as he thought. "What'll keep you from freezing, mate? What else will give you hope right now?"

"I -" Jack let Bunny go, but Bunny kept his arm tucked protectively around Jack. It made him feel welcome to keep leaning against Bunny's shoulder, so, he did. "I need proof that what I see isn't - isn't true. That there's still good in the world and that it isn't all pain and suffering." He settled into the soft fur, wishing he could feel a little of Bunny's warmth through his thick coat. "That things like fun still exist."

"Fun," Bunny repeated, thoughtful. "Well - we've had some fun over the years, haven't we? A lot of yelling over the hedges, but some of it's funny in hindsight. Remember '56 when the Groundhog got caught in our crossfire?"

The memory was slow to come, but - "Didn't I ice his whiskers to a sign pole?"

"And I may have accidentally wrapped him to it with vines."

Jack laughed once, a chuckle mercifully devoid of vindictiveness. "That so wasn't an accident."

"And icing his whiskers was?"

Jack smirked. "You can't say he didn't deserve it."

"Seppo needs to stop acting like he decides when Spring comes, and that's all I'm saying."

A little bit of Bunny's warmth was finally seeping through his fur, where Jack's cheek was still pressed against it. The touch of warmth made the oppressive cold bite even harder. Jack shivered as his laughter over that particular memory faded.

"What else?" Bunny said, putting his free paw on Jack's arm to melt a sheen of frost growing on his sleeve. "Come on, Frost, we've had more than a few laughs."

"Have we?" Jack asked, pulling back to look Bunny in the eye. "You said you had fun, but I never saw it - "

Bunny chuckled. "I might have laughed when I planned a drop sometime in the 1800's."

Jack gasped with realization. "The dogwood tree of '35!"

"Gotta say, I was surprised you took the bait."

"The whole thing was in bloom a month early. How was I supposed to resist icing it up? You got me good that time. I was stuck in that tree for _five hours,_" said Jack, without a trace of resentment.

"Five?" Bunny looked surprised. "I figured I'd got you for two, three tops."

"The vines were really stiff. You know what I had to do to stave off the boredom? I sang folk songs. Hour four was a straight loop of the Bird Song. You reduced me to singing _folk songs. _I spent the last hour planning the blizzard of '68."

"Took you that long to get around to it, huh?"

"Well, you know how it is," Jack said, with a chuckle. "A lot of stuff cropped up between now and then. Snowball fights, stuffy Victorians to mess with, movies became a thing - but the seeds of revenge were planted that day."

But they were both laughing, and it wasn't forced, or stilted laughter. It was warm and real. There were years of conflict that hadn't actually been conflict behind them, and even with the shards doing there best to twist everything around Jack back into something horrible, just the fact that he _could_ still laugh, and feel it, was giving him hope - as much as the notion that Old Man Winter_ could_ be overcome, _had_ been overcome, was.

And Bunny still hadn't pushed Jack off, and he could feel the edge taken off the chill in his fingers, where he wound them into Bunny's downy coat. Bunny even rubbed Jack's shoulder as Jack leaned against him. The contact was a like a tether, dragging him back from thoughts of not belonging, of having everything he'd gained drifting away, closer to reality - to what he hoped was reality - that it was all solid. That it would stay.

"Three hundred years of bad first impressions -" Bunny said, suddenly, his own mood going melancholy. "We would've had more laughs if I hadn't -" he paused again, exhaling his frustration. "If I hadn't treated you like a criminal. If I'd known -"

"Maybe if I - " Jack paused. "When this is over, we can have them." If he survived this. If they all survived this. He had to try his best to think they would.

"Yeah?" Bunny leaned back to look Jack in the eye again. "So you're gonna stick with us, mate?"

"I'll try," Jack nodded. "If North can do it..."

The shards couldn't twist Bunny's smile as anything but relieved.

"You do that, and I'll make sure we have time to make up with," he said, with conviction. "I promise, no more running off. If Old Man Winter wants you, he's gotta go through me first."

Jack looked deep inside his frozen heart and found no words to fit what he felt just then.

He simply threw his arms around Bunny in a fiercely needy hug, and Bunny folded his arms around Jack again after the briefest surprised pause.

"Okay," Jack croaked into Bunny's ruff.

"She'll be right, mate." Bunny stroked Jack's hair like he was something precious, hugging him like he could thaw him out himself.

Jack buried his face in Bunny's ruff, trying to let some of his warmth reach the cold, stabbing pain in his eyes. His voice was muffled by rabbit fur as he spoke. "Tell me some other times you laughed."

"Ah -" Bunny paused as he patted Jack comfortingly on the back. "There was the equinox of '55 - autumnal, not vernal. You iced the streamers from some kid's party to my tail, remember that? I didn't notice for about an hour, but I had a laugh when I did -"

Jack smiled, as he curled against Bunny like he was a pillow. A pillow of rabbity sinew, if the truth were told, but with a lot of warm soft fluff cushioning it. "I'm really tired. I'm just gonna close my eyes for a moment."

"Sure," said Bunny, with a softness that Jack had only heard him reserve for children. Jack thought of the Easter before, and Sophie, Bunny cradling her with a practiced hand as she slept, and wondered if he'd been thinking back to other children - ones that were smaller, and rabbit-shaped, from centuries before. That thought stabbed at his heart with sadness. He closed his eyes tightly, tears welling over the rime of frost growing on his lids.

Maybe Bunny caught sight of the tears, because he went on. "Then there was '97. North Carolina. Light dusting a few days before Easter, yeah? That was a good one for the kids - a nice, soft snowfall. Saw some of 'em playing on my dry run. One was drawing eggs in the snow -"

"She didn't have gloves," Jack said, slowly, sleepiness creeping into his voice. "So she put socks on her hands -"

Bunny chuckled. "Smart kid. What else - freeze of 1821, I believe. Kyoto. You caught the cherry blossoms, kept 'em around a couple days longer. That was actually kind of pretty, even if they couldn't fall that year. And autumn, when we ran into each other in Wanaka -"

Jack's breathing was deep and even, and when Bunny paused, Jack didn't object.

"- and had a rugby match with the Groundhog and the Leprechaun." Jack said nothing. "And you're asleep, aren't you."

Jack's continued silence gave him the proof he needed.

Bunny finally shivered. "Crikey, this is cold." Ice was starting to spread into his undercoat, and he'd already lost a (fortunately tiny) handful of that to the elf. He picked Jack up as gently as possible, carrying him back to the other Guardians at the entrance to the cave. "Let's get you to that fire while we still have one."

The others looked up as Bunny returned with Jack, surprise and relief mixed on everyone's features when they saw breath puffing into the air from Jack's lips (except for Anansi, who smiled smugly like he'd won a bet).

"How is he?" Tooth flitted over, Sandy close behind.

Bunny carried Jack over to the fire. "Still cold, but he had a thaw." He tapped the floor by the fire, and moss grew thickly on it.

Tooth zipped over, her smile bright with relief as Bunny laid Jack on the mossbed. Sandy alighted next to her and dusted Jack gently with dreamsand. Jack's blank face shifted into the slightest smile as the dream brought him comfort, and the three Guardians kneeling over him shared the same hopeful smile.

Sandy patted Bunny on the shoulder before he floated back over to North. Tooth leaned over to touch Jack's hand.

"He's still so cold," she said, as a thin layer of frost shimmered on his skin.

"It helped," Bunny said, "but it wasn't enough. Whatever we have to do to break the spell, we haven't done it yet."

They looked at Jack, silent, worried. Jack, under the dreamsand's influence, slept on.

"But the talk went well, right?" said Tooth, as the silence grew heavier.

Bunny's expression was distant again, but he didn't look away from Jack.

"All that time," he said, his voice marked with regret. "He was just as alone as I was, and we didn't have to be -"

Tooth placed one of her dainty hands on Bunny's shoulder, and he looked at her gentle half-smile.

"- you want so badly to say 'I told you so,' don't you Tooth?"

Tooth's smile became a little more pronounced. "It's hard to resist."

"Maybe they should call you the Counselling Fairy after all," he joked, but his voice was free from resentment. Silence fell over them again, companionable this time

"Something's bothering me though," Bunny said, his frown returned. "The Man in the Moon - he chose Jack to be the Winter that Old Man Winter wasn't. A better one, for the kids. He didn't let us know at all - why not?"

Tooth blinked with surprise. "Maybe he couldn't."

"He can do what he's done for all of us, talk to us when it suits him, and he couldn't give us a heads-up about the new guy? All that time, we thought he was just new, some carefree little spirit, a little shallow like a lot of the ones are when they're made new - like poor Frosty. But all that time, he was supposed to be one of us."

Bunny paused as Tooth considered that, and added, "And there's something Jack said - about Manny not talking to him for so long I didn't press it, but in all those years, he was alone - Manny couldn't give us even a note about that? Or talk to him at all?"

Bunny's expression said he was very close to casting judgement on their celestial patron. Tooth pressed her lips together, looking at Jack, considering that notion. "It _is_ pretty hard to reconcile."

Bunny grunted in agreement. "It's not our biggest concern right now, but when we're not scrapping for our lives - between that, and this clown having been a Guardian longer than you and Sandy -" he nodded towards Anansi, who was poking with one of his spider legs at the sand candy canes dancing around North's head (at least until Sandy swatted them away). "I wonder what else Manny hasn't felt we needed to know yet."

* * *

The stabbing cold drew Jack out of his restful sleep, and he contracted into a shivering ball as he awoke.

He opened his eyes by the burnt-out fire to see Anansi lounging beside him, his eyes half-lidded, as if he were lost in a deep memory.

"It was...grotesque," Anansi said, without looking at Jack. "The little bodies, frozen in the hundreds - some encased in ice, some blackened beyond recognition by frostbite. Some sighed as they thawed, as if the last breath of life was only just leaving them."

Jack's own breath stuck in his throat as he caught up to Anansi's speed. He looked around the cave, but it was empty, aside from North sleeping by the sand wall at the mouth of the cave. The others must have been on guard outside, or doing something to obscure Tooth's trail.

"He buried them all himself," Anansi went on. "Sometimes the ice was not so quick to thaw, and he had to break them free by hand. It was long, and dirty work, and the grass was not quick to grow on the little graves. Where there was and is now things that are green and growing, there were only the buried, and the yet-to-be-buried. The seat of all life in this world was every inch a tomb. And no one lived who could say with certainty that, because this was so, all life on Earth would not follow."

Anansi turned his gaze on Jack, looking at him over the edge of his gleaming glasses.

"Centuries later came a frost spirit, laughing as he undid the work of spring, freezing the new flowers as if the seasons were a game he could decide not to play."

Jack stared at Anansi a moment - then his face scrunched up in horrified misery. "Why did you tell me that?"

Anansi grinned and sighed like a connoisseur savoring a fine wine. "The timing absolutely _screamed_ for it."

Jack, who didn't like anything much more horrific than the monsters of the week on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, felt himself close to tears. "I didn't even ask you to tell me! Now that I know how graphic you get, I probably won't!"

"You think _that's_ graphic?" Anansi rolled his eyes. "Jack, I will school you in the fine art of imagery."

Jack struggled not to cry. "Now I'm thinking about it. About the little bunnies all -" unbidden, the memory of Bunny all tiny and fluffy came back to him, except now, the glass shards in his eyes made it all the easier to imagine hundreds of them, frozen solid. He lost his struggle and wept.

A tunnel opened by the mouth of the cave, and Bunny hopped out just in time to catch Jack's descent into sobbing. Bunny looked instantly at Anansi. "_What did you do?_"

Anansi shrugged, the picture of innocence, as Jack wept on the floor. "I told him an aptly timed story."

"Aptly timed?" Bunny pointed to the miserable pile of Jack. "He is in _no_ state to hear more terrible things and you thought the time was right to tell him some more?"

Anansi rolled his eyes. "The narrative practically -"

"You take your narrative and shove it," Bunny growled. "I did _not_ give him permission to ask the story so you could hurt him with it. Come to think of it, I didn't give you permission to tell him before he asked at all!"

"You also didn't give me permission to tell him of B'rer Rabbit, the Trickster Hare, the Centzon Totochtin -" Anansi pointed out helpfully. "When it comes to stories, I don't wait for permission to tell them. I wait for the moment to be right."

"Rack off," Bunny spat. "You're so up yourself you can't tell when what you've got to say is the exact opposite of what people need to hear. You're all style even when style hurts everyone but yourself. This is why no one wants to work with you."

Anansi's expression was downright indignant. "Like it or not, I am a Guardian and that means we _have_ to work together."

"Then maybe you should figure out how to do that," said Bunny sharply. He turned to Jack, leaving Anansi to his pouting. As he did, the spider myth's pout shifted, surprisingly, to an expression of deep thought.

"I really can't go running off, even for five minutes, can I?" said Bunny, as Jack sniffed and picked at the frozen tears on his face. He put his paw on Jack's shoulder. "Between Old Man Winter and that eight-legged bounce, you really _do_ need a bodyguard."

"I have ten legs," Anansi interjected, his pout back. "At the moment."

They ignored him. Bunny smiled comfortingly, but Jack just inhaled miserably, overwhelmed by the image of a Warren full of ice and death. And he'd snowed out one Easter. _And_ abandoned them long enough for Pitch to ruin another. No wonder Bunny couldn't love him enough to cure the shards.

Bunny's comforting smile faded as Jack brushed more tears from the ice on his cheeks. He knelt down and covered Jack's hand with his paw, the tears soaking into his fur, the warmth of his paw melting some of the ice away. "Hey. C'mere, you sad sack." He hugged Jack again, and Jack buried his face gratefully again in Bunny's warm fur. "It was a long time ago. And this is a different story."

"See if I deign to tell it," Anansi muttered.

North rolled over in his sleep, and awoke abruptly with the pain from his shoulder. "_Balakirev _-" He looked from Bunny and Jack hugging to Anansi pouting against the wall, his eyes wide with surprise. "How long I sleep? I have missed something?"

Tooth and Sandy zipped in through the open rabbit hole, and Bunny let go of Jack to close it as they came in.

"Jack, how are you feeling?" asked Tooth, zipping in closer, her expression one that could only be interpreted as concerned and gentle.

"I'm -" Saying he was fine was out of the question. They wouldn't believe it and more importantly, it wouldn't help him. "I really -"

What did he say? That he'd been lonely even though he was hiding it? That the shards made him feel lonely even now? That he was scared, tired of seeing the world this way, that he was fighting so hard but running out of strength to keep doing it?

Apparently, he didn't have to say anything, because North stepped forward, weary as he was, and pulled Jack up into a massive bearhug. Tooth darted over and slipped her arms around Jack, too, threading a hand through his hair. Then Sandy joined in, bouncing up into the air and floating over to wrap his arms around them. Bunny stepped in next to Tooth, and completed the five-Guardian hug.

Jack squeezed his eyes shut, tears trickling down his cheeks again.

"Ahhh," North sighed affectionately. "We are holding him too hard. Squeezing the tears out!" Then, either because he knew what those tears signified or because he was contrary like that, North squeezed Jack tighter. Jack snuffled a wet laugh into the prickly fur of his coat.

A scuffing noise caught Jack's attention, and he opened one eye to see Anansi dangling above them, held up on his spider legs, staring like they were some kind of new food he was trying to figure out how to eat.

He spread his human arms, slowly, smoothly, like a predator setting a trap.

"Oh no," Jack said, muffled by the limbs around him. "No hugs for you. You don't get to traumatize me _and_ hug me in the same ten minutes."

Anansi froze, then retreated on spiderfoot, crossing his arms. "I didn't really want to hug you," he sniffed, "It would be like hugging a bundle of frozen twigs. Elbows and ribs, everywhere."

"Sure it would," Jack said, rolling his eyes.

"I just wanted a hug because everyone else was getting one."

"How many centuries have you been this big a baby?" Jack wiggled until the other four let him go. He reached up to rub the tears from his eyes, then blinked in surprise when North knocked his hands away.

"No rubbing of the eyes," the Cossack said, patting down his pockets for a moment. Sandy, apparently understanding what North was doing, plucked a handkerchief - monogrammed, of course it was monogrammed - out of one of the pockets, and handed it to Tooth. "No reason to press shards in further."

"Really?" Jack protested, half-laughing, but Tooth was coming for him with a determined expression. "Hey, guys, I'm three-and-one-fifth centuries old. I can poke myself in the eye if I want."

"You can poke yourself in the eye all you want _later_," said Tooth, wiping down his cheeks before handing the damp hankie back to North. "Right now, we need you to see as clearly as you can, especially considering what we have to do next."

"And what are we doing next?" Jack asked. "Old Man Winter's soaked up so much of my belief that I hardly have any power left."

"And a direct conflict is likely to end in disaster," said Anansi, "especially if we're to fight the wolf at the same time."

"So let's eliminate one threat, before we tackle the other again," said Tooth, and for a moment Jack looked at her with surprise. She spoke as if their last meeting with the wolf hadn't ended in something pretty close to disaster.

But her eyes glittered with confidence, and her smile was unruffled, in spite of the monster prepared to race across continents to kill her.

"Ready to get back on the road, boys? Because I have a plan."

* * *

The lone, starving wolf that Old Man Winter called Wilhelm paced along the beach, sniffing the wind for its prey's scent. The marshes around it were full of the smells of small, defenseless creatures, but their scent was like hot air in its nose with the taste of rich blood and soft feathers still on its tongue.

When the scent ceased to blow from the islands to the south and came instead from the west, it turned eagerly north to intercept their path. With the southern swamps behind it and the farmlands of the midwest making for easy running, even the torrents of snow couldn't slow it from pursuing the scent.

The sky darkened and the snow whipped in driving winds as it raced across the crushed remains of cornstalks, to a sprawling grey building where smoke billowed from stacks into the cold air. The wolf didn't notice that the parking lot around the steel foundry was empty, that no human workers had made it past the storm that day to do anything that would have started smoke billowing from the stacks. All it smelled was the blood it had already tasted.

It huffed, and puffed, and blew a harsh wind that shattered the glass windows on ground level, smelling the Queen of the Tooth Fairy Armies' blood more strongly as it jumped through the broken window and raced through the foundry, panting in the sudden heat from the steel melting in the belching machinery. Her scent oozed from on high, where she fluttered erratically as if injured - making her all the easier to catch.

The wolf moved stealthily, the sound of its nails against the steel gratings covered by the noise of the wind whipping through the chinks in the foundry. It crept up the scaffolding that lead to a deck on the level of the prey's erratic fluttering. When it was obvious the Tooth Fairy was going nowhere, trapped by a monstrous spider's web, the wolf ran, leaped, lunging for her with gnashing jaws.

Toothiana whipped around to face it as Anansi yanked the spiderweb free from her foot. She cut a single, firm slash across the air with North's borrowed sword, and the wolf howled, tasting its own blood again.

"NOW!" she shouted.

Tooth darted out of the way as Anansi threw a net of webbing at the wolf. The wolf puffed up and exhaled a gale that pushed it over the great cauldron where the Tooth Fairy had set her trap, out of the way of Anansi's net. The wolf landed on the far deck, bunching itself up for another leap at Tooth, who held her ground with the borrowed sword.

"POUR IT ANYWAY!" she shouted, and a boomerang whipped through the air, knocking a lever that fell with a loud buzz. Behind the wolf, a stream of molten steel poured into the cauldron. The temperature in the foundry grew steadily as a layer of dreamsand covered the blown-out windows, filling in the chinks in the building where the wind blew cold air in. Caught between the inferno and prey that bit back, the wolf howled its chilling caterwaul loud enough to rattle the windows in their panes, but the noise of the steel-fall softened the edge of its terrible scream. The Guardians gathered around Tooth, and in the rising temperature, faced with the strength of six, the wolf bared its fangs anyway and snapped, desperate for its meal.

While they corralled it closer and closer to the stream of molten steel, with Jack lagging back, slick with sweat and melted ice in the intense heat, a window burst above them, the glass falling without a sound anyone could hear. A familiar shape fluttered through.

Old Man Winter landed in front of Jack without so much as a glance at the wolf and the Guardians. The roar of the steel pouring covered the sound of his landing. Jack couldn't even hear his own voice as he screamed for help.

Old Man Winter mouthed the words as he lunged - he probably didn't even bother to speak them - "No one can hear you, boy."

But he was wrong.

Bunny intercepted him in a grey blur. His fist landed squarely on Old Man Winter's cheekbone, and the force of the blow shattered his frozen skin, cracks webbing up the side of the old man's face. Thick black blood oozed from the cracks in clotted globs.

The steel finished pouring and the noise cut out as Old Man Winter fell completely to the ground, Bunny skidding to a stop between him and Jack, shaking his fist out.

"Now _that_ was satisfying." Bunny grinned at Jack over his shoulder. "All right there, mate?"

Jack couldn't help but grin back, the little ice that the heat hadn't melted yet sliding off him.

"Just fine." He hefted his staff as Old Man Winter pushed himself upright.

The old man gritted his teeth in pain, but he grinned as he touched the wound on his face.

"So! Someone still has fight in them after all -" he looked to see which Guardian had managed to land the blow, and his bloodthirsty grin turned to a grimace of dismay as he saw Bunny standing between him and Jack, poised to defend.

"Seriously?" he exclaimed, disappointed. "The rabbit. It's really the rabbit again. Now this is just embarrassing - for you guys _and_ me. Well bunny rabbit, where I'm from we ate rabbits for breakfast, lunch, and dinner - literally - but my days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."

"That joke's way too good," Jack called from behind Bunny. "There's no way you came up with that one on your own."

Old Man Winter's fractured face contorted into a nasty snarl. "Treasure those free shots, both of you, because you're not getting another!"

He pulled an ice spear out of the air, snarling with dismay when it melted instantly in the intense heat. Before he could regroup or form another, Bunny was on him, and the two were locked in hand-to-hand combat.

Jack stood by, staff ready, but there was neither need nor opportunity for him to step in. Bunny moved with relentless grace, forcing Old Man Winter back towards the Guardians still fighting the wolf and the vat of molten steel. Old Man Winter reeled with frustration as his blows struck air or glanced off Bunny's lightning-fast blocks, still off-balance and unprepared with his spear, while Bunny moved on a thousand years of preparation.

Jack saw the familiar glint of ice shards in Old Man Winter's hands and yelled a warning - Bunny sidestepped as Old Man Winter lunged unexpectedly with his right hand, pulling Old Man Winter along the force of his own lunge. The old Viking fell to the ground, hard, the ice shards scattering across the steel deck.

Bunny leaped to hit Old Man Winter while he was down, but the old man lashed out with an ice knife that stayed sharp only long enough to cut a few strands of Bunny's fur before it dulled in the hot air. Bunny twisted on his own momentum and landed between Old Man Winter and Jack.

"Go ahead," Bunny growled, and if the grin on his face was as satisfied at the old man's difficulty without the shards warping it, well, Jack couldn't blame Bunny for that. Not one bit. "Get up, Old Man. I could do this all day."

There was no more trace of a manic smile on Old Man Winter's face as he rose. "Well are we dancing, or are we fighting?"

He lunged at Bunny, trying to back him onto one of the shards glittering on the deck, but he hadn't counted on teamwork. Jack leapt forward and snatched the shard - carefully - just before Bunny stepped on it, tucking into a roll that kept him from tripping the rabbit up with his body. Old Man Winter howled with rage as Jack skipped about, collecting the rest of the shards, and Bunny went about showing him the wrong side of a fight.

The lashing of Sandy's whips, Anansi's webs, and North and Tooth's swords stopped suddenly, as with a sudden yelp, the wolf lost its ground, claws scraping at the very edge of the deck. Still it lunged for Tooth, wild-eyed, starving for a taste of her again - with one last blow of the sword, she cut its nose open, and as it reared in pain, she lashed out a final blow that sent it falling into the molten steel below. The air filled with a howl of rage and pain that became the same multi-voiced screech of terror that, even in the heat, chilled the Guardians down to their bones.

It petered out. Old Man Winter howled angrily. "_Way to double down, Wilhelm_!"

"Seriously?" Jack held the shards awkwardly, afraid to move too quickly just in case they slipped and cut his hands. "You named it Wilhelm?"

Tooth, North, Sandy, and Anansi reassembled around Bunny, barricading themselves between Old Man Winter and Jack. Nothing stood between Old Man Winter and the open vat of molten steel where the wolf had just died. The old man looked from face to face, his expression full of dismay at his outnumbering, and his surprising outclassing.

His expression hardened. "I suppose you'll want me to take the Enkidu Oath now."

"No," said Bunny. He took a step forward, and Old Man Winter stepped back. "But we'll offer you the chance."

"Oh sure, that's real gracious," Old Man Winter, hunched and shuffling, no longer a terrifying figure of unstoppable cold death, but an old man wilting in the heat. "An eternity of defying my very nature just because a few mortals can't take the chill. Remind me why their lives matter more than mine?"

"Are you taking the Oath or not?" Tooth shouted, standing at Bunny's side with North's saber leveled, motionless, in her steady hand.

"Lemme think it over," Old Man Winter pouted. "You can't rush a decision like this. I mean, do I _really_ want to live in a world where _you_ clowns are letting just any kid grow up? I mean - you ever stop to think about all the murderers who grow up safe and sound under _your _protection? The ways people these days come up with to hurt each gotta admire their creativity. _Two_ world wars and multiple genocides? It's almost enough to make me hang up my icicles and just leave destroying the world up to humanity. Sure it'll take longer but the end result will be the same -" he grinned. "With that in mind, maybe I'll take the Oath. Maybe I want to stick around and see it after all. Maybe I'll even make some like-minded friends, over the years - after all, even I was a kid once. And look what I grew up to be."

"Oath," Bunny shouted, "Or death! In five - four -"

"All right all right," Old Man Winter waved his hands. "I've made my choice. I'll take door number three."

The Guardians as one said, "What?" as Old Man Winter fell, smiling, backwards into the molten steel.

They rushed to the edge of the deck just in time to see the red steel folding over the space where Old Man Winter had just been. They stared into the vat.

"Is - is that it?" Jack asked. "What did he mean by door number three?"

The rumbling was sudden and loud - and then the foundry exploded around them.

The storm poured in, whipping the warmth of the foundry away. Ice froze instantly on Jack, so fast and so cold that he shouted in pain as the shards dug deep into his eyes. North howled beside him, too, before everything was drowned out by Old Man Winter's laughter.

The wind that shattered the walls blew the vat over. Steel poured out and hardened instantly in the cold. Old Man Winter walked out of it, pulling himself free with sheer brute force, his steel shell cracking like alligator skin as he moved.

Jack felt it, in his belly - the power that should have been there, giving him strength, absent completely.

"That," said Anansi, his voice low with horror, "is a winter spirit with the belief of two - in case you were wondering."

Old Man Winter raised his steel-covered hand. Sandy, Tooth, Bunny, and Anansi barely had time to turn before they were encased in a torrent of ice.

Jack screamed as the wind ripped the shards from his hands, scattering them into nothing. When he turned back, Old Man Winter was _there _and he didn't have time to shout before Old Man Winter grabbed his hoodie and jerked him off his feet.

North lashed out with his saber but Old Man Winter sidestepped easily and a sudden wind blew North to his knees. Old Man Winter grabbed the back of his coat, and the next gust of wind threw all three of them into the air.

"So North," said Old Man Winter, almost conversationally, yelling over the screeching wind as he dragged them higher and higher into the air - "what exactly are your powers, anyway? Not being old, even though you are old? Kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel for superpowers there, isn't it? Or do you secretly have a surprising ability to survive falls from the upper atmosphere that you rarely get to use? I'm hoping that's not one, for the record."

That was it, wasn't it, thought Jack. Jokul planned to kill North by dropping him from high enough and then devour Jack's heart without interference.

"Falls? Who ever died from a fall?" said North, struggling in Old Man Winter's grip. He waved his sword as if trying to cut Jokul, but his free hand slipped into his pocket, slowly, because of his injured shoulder. "Falls are fine. Landings? Not so much."

Old Man Winter laughed raucously, half at North's snark, half at his futile attempts to reach him with the sword. "Oh North, there's the humor I'm going to miss when you're a stain on the ground! Woo, the laughs we've had! I may not be planning to eat your heart, Northy, but that wit will live on in mine. Landings! Now there's a classic for the ages!"

"You know what else is classic?" asked North.

"What?" asked Old Man Winter, still amused.

"How you say, screwball comedy," North said, and he tossed the snowglobe he'd found in his pocket into Old Man Winter's flightpath. "See? There is ball."

"I don't get it."

_Vorp_ went the snowglobe, and a portal opened onto a place that looked very, very red, and very very hot. North grabbed Jack's hoodie and slashed with sudden purpose at Jokul Frosti's arm. The Cossak's weight ripped Jack from Jokul's gnarled grip as Old Man Winter dropped him, yelping in pain as he spun out of control and into the portal. Jack and North fell away as it closed.

Jack grabbed his staff to whip the wind back under his control. Without Jokul Frosti guiding it, it was truly chaotic, throwing snow (and them) in every direction. Jack strained to control it, and when that proved impossible, to ride it - that was a little easier, but not much with North's weight throwing him off. He descended, too fast, the very last of his power slipping away like water dripping from an icicle.

The staff finally dropped from beneath Jack and he and North fell straight down, to a hard landing in a snowdrift.

Jack wheezed, the wind knocked out of him. With a groan, he tried to drag himself out of the snow.

"North?"

The wind shrieked in Jack's ears and the snow pelted his face as if to slough it off. He climbed to his feet with his staff for support, and cast about for North.

"North! Where are you?"

The wind buffeted his body as Jack trudged, stumbling, through the blinding snow. He wiped the ice from his face to clear his vision, and spotted a flash of red in the white expanse.

"North!" Jack ran forward and dropped to his knees next to the older man."North, are you okay?"

North was breathing - and then moving, as he waved a hand dismissively.

"Fine. Fine. Just need - just need moment to rest."

"Okay. Okay." Jack panted, looking up in the air nervously.

"He won't be back soon," said North, guessing Jack's worry. "Snowglobe sent him to center of volcano."

"Do you think it killed him?"

"No. Not with power he has now. Probably just flew out. Still, it may slow him down. Long distance he must travel back here."

Jack nodded and knelt in the snow, waiting for North to recover enough of his strength to get up.

Eventually the old man tried to sit up, but even with Jack helping him, he was too weak. After two tries, North fell back into the snow and lay still.

"C'mon," Jack urged. "C'mon, North, we have to get back to the others. Give it another try, I'll help you up."

"I -" North tried to sit up again, but didn't even make it halfway out of the snow. "I think this will not be happening anytime soon."

Jack stood up, looking into the distance at the steel foundry barely visible on the horizon. "Then I'll go back. I'll go back and bring help."

He started to walk, but North gently grasped his ankle.

"I think this will not be happening either."

Jack knelt in the snow and only then Noticed how pale North was, his normally ruddy skin a nearly translucent gray.

"I have to go," he insisted. "I have to get help. I'm gonna go get help - "

"Jack," North said softly. Jack felt sorrow sink down and pool in the bottom of his gut, like rainwater dripping into a cave. "Stay with me."

"I'll go get help and you'll be fine," Jack said, his voice cracking. "You'll be fine, you'll see."

"Fine," said North, with a very slight sigh, but he made himself smile anyway. "I am maybe fine. But maybe I will be fine elsewhere - I do not think there is any time left to be fine here."

"Don't - Don't say that. Look at you. The shards hardly even affected you. Not like they've been affecting me. You never stopped - you never lost yourself, at all -"

"They have not frozen my heart," North agreed, gasping once for breath, "but still they have taken their toll. Just not the same way as you, because my life has less pain to draw from to be turning my heart cold. There is more for you - not because of weakness or coldness already there - but because there is much more sorrow in your years to prey on. So much you have survived -"

"I haven't - haven't had to survive anything," said Jack.

North touched Jack's face, brushing his fingers against his cheek.

"That shows how strong you are, Jack." North smiled, his face full of the warmth Jack could no longer feel. "That you don't even know what you faced was hardship."

Jack reached a cold hand to North's, holding it in place against his cheek.

"You can't die, North," he said. His voice cracked like an iceberg separating from its fellows to lurk in the shipping lanes. "Who - who will take care of Christmas? Someone's got to rebuild the Pole when this is over, and deliver all the toys."

"Yeti will make do," North said. His mouth, thin and pale as it was, twitched upward in a smile. "Naughty children might receive coal _and_ elf, but yeti will manage until someone else steps in."

Jack wheezed, a weak attempt at a laugh for a weak attempt at a joke. North wasn't supposed to have an answer for that, he was supposed to_get up_.

"You shouldn't have got in his way," he said bitterly. "I'm gonna die anyway and now you're dying for nothing, because you tried to save me."

"Nothing?" North said, his voice growing weak. "Is not nothing. If you die, too, I will wait for you on other side, so you do not have to face what comes next alone. You have already faced too much alone. If you live, I helped you to live. Either way, only one thing is important, only one thing matters..."

"What? What thing?" Jack asked around the lump in his throat.

"That you know you are cared for, Jack. That," North breathed out, "is worth a life."

He had no last words beyond that. Sometimes, death was not a prolonged ordeal, with time for goodbyes. Finality was not the same as closure.

North simply closed his eyes, as if he was going to sleep. His hand slipped from Jack's cheek, but Jack gripped it as if holding it tight enough would keep North from slipping away, too.

"North?" Jack said in a hushed voice. The wind whipped the name away.

Jack sat in the snow, looking at North's face as the falling snowflakes clung to his beard. His sight blurred, splitting into a kaleidoscope of white, red, and grey as fat tears welled up and rolled down his face.

A vague memory struck him, of a different weathered hand in his own, of his mother weeping as another normally boisterous voice went quiet and another body went still. Just as quickly, that vision was gone, but the feeling of loss remained, magnified by the fact that in the brief time Jack had known him, North was - had been - the first person he'd felt was like family after three hundred years alone.

The cold threatened to sink into his heart, but as painful as it was, Jack let himself feel the grief - he _made_ himself feel it. North had said that Jack knowing he was cared for was worth a life. North being loved - and grieved for - the way he deserved was worth the pain.

Jack lay his head on North's still chest, over his heart, and wept until his tears soaked through the fur of his coat.

As he knelt there, the cold of the wind stole into his bones, cut through to the very core of him, touched the bitter cold of the shards that were already there. The last tear froze to his face, and he no longer felt pain, no longer felt sorrow, no longer felt love, no longer felt anything. The cold, quietly, won out.

Jack stood, leaning on his staff, and trudged away in the direction of the foundry. The weight of the ice clinging to his body bent him nearly doubled over like an old man, and he stumbled into the bleak haze, leaving the source of his grief behind him, half-buried in the rapidly falling snow.

"No one makes it home tonight," Old Man Winter had said. Jack wasn't sure what it meant to the other winter spirit, but he wanted to defy it and make it home. That didn't mean going back to Burgess, of course. It meant going to the others, because they were his home.

It was normal, after all, for people to want to die at home.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: **Please deposit all your tears in the donation jar to be spread among the authors.

* * *

**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders, Kaylin, and Saph

* * *

**Chapter 7**

There wasn't an ice cube's chance in a steel foundry that the Guardians were going to let Old Man Winter get away with kidnapping two of their own.

Bunny broke free of the ice first, gasping for air.

"Jack!" he hollered, wriggling free of the last bits of ice and leaping to the edge of the platform, broken and exposed in the wind that whistled through the wrecked foundry, scenting the air. "North!"

Sandy burst free second. He scoured Tooth and Anansi with a blast of sand, and they broke free from the thinned ice, Tooth flapping her wings furiously to dry them, Anansi with much colorful and creative language. Sandy was too worried even to tut at the Spider.

"Bunny?" Tooth called.

"I'm working on it!" Bunny answered from the edge of the platform. "I'll find them, Tooth, and they're gonna be fine and I'm going to kick Old Man Winter so hard he'll be looking for his guts halfway to the moon!"

Bunny leapt from the platform to a broken window, assisted by a narrow trail of dreamsand in his attempt to reach even higher ground to scent from. He paused at the top of the ruined east wall, his ears twitching as he caught something on the north wind.

"Jack!"

Bunny jumped down the wall, ricocheting off machinery and pelting for the north doorway. The others caught up just as Bunny wrenched the door open, and recoiled in almost instinctive horror. It was hard to blame them; at first sight, it was almost impossible to tell that the figure hunched in the doorway _wasn't_ Old Man Winter.

"Jack!"

Jack two steps forward, leaning heavily on his staff, then collapsed. Bunny caught him before he hit the ground, wincing. Even through his fur, the cold was close to burning.

"Jack, where's North? Where's Old Man Winter?" Tooth asked. She and Bunny moved him inside, to a sheltered space between machines, out of the harsh wind and away from the broken windows. "Are you hurt?"

"North's gone," Jack said in a voice that almost echoed, as if it came from the hollow darkness of an ice cave.

"Gone, as in...?" Bunny prompted.

"Gone. He used a snow-globe tossed Old Man Winter away from here. But the shards..." Jack's voice was blank, all his emotion spent, the last remains frozen to his face. "Christmas isn't coming this year. It's never coming again."

Tooth clapped her hands to her mouth as if she could capture her gasp of horror and swallow it down. Sandy slumped, closing his eyes like reality was a poorly-crafted dream that could be dismissed. Bunny flinched as if the words had hit him in the chest, his ears falling to lay down his back.

"No!" Anansi protested. "No, that's not how it goes!" He scuttled to Jack on his spider's legs and grasped Jack by the arms. His wince made it clear that the ice burned his palms, but he ignored the pain. "That cannot be all! That is not how these stories go!"

Bunny wrenched Anansi's grip from Jack. "Get off him!"

"This isn't one of your stories, Anansi," Jack said, seemingly unphased by Anansi's fervor. His eyes, completely grey and cold, flicked to Bunny. "Even if it was, not every story has a happy ending. A lot of them have people that - that get left behind."

Even seated, he was unsteady, and he wove, barely able to sit up any longer.

"I need you all to promise me you won't let him get my heart."

Tooth shook her head as she knelt next to him, tears spilling from her eyes from her grief at losing one friend and the grief of knowing she was about to lose another. "Jack -"

"If you can make them understand he's not me and take his power away," Jack interrupted her, "If you can make the children understand - you might have a chance. But not if he takes my heart. I'd rather you keep it safe if it freezes - destroy it if you have to."

"Oh, how touching," came a voice from the shadows of the foundry. "It's as if you actually think they care about you, Frost."

They recognized the voice, their tear-stained faces hardening at once into expressions of ferocity. The Guardians moved quickly into position, weapons and fists raised, gathered around Jack and prepared to fight. Jack struggled to his feet, despite his weakness, gripping his staff for strength.

"Pitch!" Bunny called out, boomerang raised. "Show yourself!"

"Why would I want to do that? So you can give me a good crack on the - what was it you called it? The 'nong'? - like you did to the old man? I think I'll pass."

"You were watching us?" Tooth said quietly, the gears clicking in her head. She and Sandy shared a look of concern as together, they realized why Pitch would have been watching a fight that didn't involve him.

Bunny's eyes went wide as he figured it out.

"You woke him up! He was down there sleeping in the shadows, where the nightmares dragged you, and you woke him up!" he cried out, outraged that one of his two most hated enemies had unleashed the other on the world.

"All it took was a well-placed nightmare," said Pitch. His voice shifted constantly, coming from one shadow, then the other. "That's enough to wake up just about anyone. After that, it was just a matter of sitting back and watching the show. I'll tell you one thing, Jokul certainly doesn't do anything by half measures, but I was counting on that."

"The grootslang," said Anansi. He sounded angry, but unsurprised. "The other creatures stirring in the dark - they woke at _your_ presence."

"I can't say it was on purpose, but why would I look a gift horse in the mouth? Especially when the grootslang so conveniently tunneled a way right back to the surface for me."

Pitch's voice oozed from behind Jack, and he whipped around to defend himself - but now the voice came from deeper in the foundry, echoing through the empty vats. "But we're avoiding the elephant in the room, aren't we, Anansi? What are you doing here? Don't tell me the Man in the Moon chose _you _as a new Guardian."

Anansi grinned, and Jack suddenly realized why Anansi's toothy grin always bothered him, aside from being a brilliant white that Tooth was sure to notice. There was a flash in Anansi's grin too reminiscent of a spider's fangs darting out to bite its prey. The predatory glint was much more overt when it was directed at an enemy.

"Oh yes," said Anansi, teeth gleaming - "A Guardian, new and so, so very old."

"You never were one for straight answers."

"We're all creatures of habit," Anansi answered. "I see yours haven't changed. You're still as power-hungry as ever. How strong have you gotten now that the children of the world are trapped in the snow under an overcast sky?"

"Strong enough to beat all of you, if that's what you're wondering," said Pitch. "Especially in your current state. Where is North by the way? Did I hear Jack correctly? Is the old blowhard really gone for good?"

The last embers of any sort of fire burning inside Jack flared up at Pitch's disrespect to North. He stepped forward with a cry of anger, staff at the ready. Pitch's chuckle echoed through the foundry.

"Ah, I see your heart hasn't frozen over entirely. Good. I'm not too late. But you're close now, Jack. Very close. I suppose I'll have to cut to the chase."

A shadow moved suddenly in the corner of Jack's eye. He turned at the flash of movement and saw Pitch standing behind Anansi, scythe raised.

"Anansi, look out!"

The spider myth dodged just in time, whipping a leg out into Pitch's arm, knocking the scythe-blow wide.

"Why the hurry, Pitch? I thought you wanted to hear about North," Anansi said, glib as he scuttled out of Pitch's way. "I wouldn't have picked you as one for tales of heart-rending heroics. Would you like to hear this one?"

Pitch's eyes gleamed as he faded back into the dark as the Guardians rushed to Anansi's aid, disappearing before any of them were close enough to get a blow in. Bunny's boomerang whipped harmlessly through the shadows and back to his paw.

"Spare me the sob-story, Spider," said Pitch, his voice coming from beneath a mass of machinery. "A blowhard is gone from the world - all the better for me."

"Perhaps you'd like to hear another," suggested Anansi. "One of your future defeat."

Pitch chuckled. "Speculative fiction isn't my genre either. Has your mastery over stories gone the way of your peoples' belief in you, Anansi? I have to say - picking a Guardian no one believed in yet was one thing, but I'm more than a little surprised that the Man in the Moon would pick a Guardian no one believes in _anymore_."

"_Pitch!"_ Bunny shouted, as the last of his temper frayed. "If you're so powerful, come out of the shadows and fight us like you mean it!"

Anansi pressed his lips together, but it was the only sign Jack could see that Pitch's barb had landed.

"Tempting," Pitch's voice ran along the remains of the wall, slithering between the shadows cast by the machinery. "Truly, truly tempting - so -"

And then he was there - in front of them.

"Why not?"

Pitch flipped his hand, and a solidified shadow rose and flipped a huge steel vat over, trapping the Sandman in the bowl underneath. The shadows stretched into near-human shapes that held the edges of the vat down and the steel gonged as Sandy attacked it from the inside, lashing it with sand whips. Bunny had already launched his boomerang at Pitch, but caught himself mid-jump to raise his foot to open a tunnel to let Sandy out - but chains, entwined with shadows that were solid, whipped around his midsection and pulled him off the ground before he could stamp on it. His boomerang returned to the space he'd been and clattered harmlessly against the steel cauldron as Bunny hung, struggling, overhead.

"Take a moment," said Pitch, as he parried Tooth's attacks with her sword, his scythe slicing easily through Anansi's webs when he attempted to either pull Bunny down, or pull the vat over to release Sandy. "Can't you _feel_ the fear building? Oh I know _you_ can," he said, a small wave of nightmare sand more than enough to counter the small attack Jack barely had strength anymore to launch. "But really, all of you, drink it in."

He slammed Tooth against the wall with the back of his scythe. She landed, hard against Sandy's vat, dropping her sword, stuck on a gob of Anansi's sticky webs. The spider silk refused to give against her struggles, and her sword lay out of reach.

"How many sweet dreams have they had, in the last few days?" Pitch called, his voice loud enough to cut through the thick walls of the vat imprisoning Sandy. "Not many? Because while you've been busy, Sandman, _so have I._"

The sound of Sandy's attacks on the inner walls of the vat paused as Pitch's implication sank in. Then came the sound of Sandy attacking anew, stronger this time, the lashing of the dreamsand coming faster and faster. Tooth gritted her teeth against the noise and the vibration.

"Does it remind you of anything?" said Pitch, confident enough to turn his gaze straight up into the air, where Bunny was still struggling against the chains. "Maybe of this time last year, when nobody had any sweet dreams?"

He brought his scythe down with a whoosh, and the tip pierced the hem of Anansi's dashiki, pinning him to the ground before he could scuttle to Tooth to free her. "When every time the children closed their eyes, all they saw were visions so horrible they never wanted to sleep again?" His eyes glittered with malice - and triumph. "If this keeps up, and soon, the children will start associating Easter less with springtime and more with _fear."_

Bunny couldn't hide the horror in his expression. Then the horror gave way to rage, and he threw himself into his fight against the chains. "You shadow-sneaking ratbag! I'll finish you first!"

"What, you'll finish me like you finished Old Man Winter? You'll do nothing of the sort and you know it," said Pitch. "But this isn't about you or how fated you are, it seems, never to save the ones you love. No, this is about _him_."

Pitch rounded on Jack, gliding towards him like some sort of deranged phantom. Jack held out his staff nervously, stumbling away from him weakly, the icicles all over his body tinkling as he moved.

Though he seemed to have the tiniest sparks of power left if he dug deep enough (maybe some kids like Jamie and his friends still believed he wasn't causing the storms?) they surely wouldn't be enough to face Pitch.

"You ruined my plans, Jack. The children dealt the final blow, but you were the spanner in the works, the fly in the ointment. You tipped over the first domino, didn't you - and what I wonder is why."

"You had to be stopped," Jack croaked weakly, eyes narrowed.

"Because of the children. Of course, because the world needs hope and light and_ fun_. But that isn't the way the world is, Jack. It's not a place where those things belong. You can see that now, can't you, how the darkness is inevitable?"

"Not inevitable," Anansi grunted as he tore himself free, shredding his dashiki on Pitch's blade. He shot a strand of web onto Jack, and flung him onto the walkway overhead, safely out of the way. "Only insidious. Let me tell you a story..."

Pitch swiped jagged blades of nightmare sand in Anansi's direction. The spider dodged every blow and Pitch swept his scythe back into his hands.

"Before you say another word, you should know that I'm not interested in your bedtime stories. What a shame that they're all you have, then, isn't it?"

"Oh, I would not accuse myself of shame," quipped Anansi, thwipping webs out to trip Pitch up. They were small, but surprisingly effective bursts - sticking the handle of his scythe to the ground when it swept low enough to touch it, or the tip to a piece of machinery when it drew too close, making Pitch have to pause to break the strong, sticky silk just long enough to slow him down enough for Anansi to talk. "Anyway, what makes you think the Great Anansi is reduced to idle bedtime chatter?"

"Because I know your greatest fear," said Pitch, grinning a toothy grin, his voice as smooth as the silk of Anansi's webs.

Anansi fought on, unphased, throwing out stronger webs to bind Pitch's scythe in place.

"I'm nearly as old as you, Pitch, and I've spent just as much time in the dark. You're right that I have few true believers anymore. I survive on the little blinks of time that children believe my stories are true, that I am still real. But I've learned a few things in my time that you have not."

With Pitch stuck, pulling his scythe from the webs, Anansi jumped in to grab the weapon. He wrestled for control of the scythe, leaning in close enough to say in a voice too hushed for the others to hear, "What I've learned is that fear matters very little. It can be overcome. You may know my fears, but I know your story, and the past - what I know - cannot change. But the ending of your story - even now, you can write a better one."

Pitch kicked Anansi in the stomach, and he sprawled backwards. "What about my story could you possibly know that I don't?" the bogeyman sneered.

Anansi flipped to his feet again, his voice still hushed. "I know about the locket you keep hidden away in the dark."

Pitch's eyes went wide. He froze in place long enough for Anansi to whip out one of his spider's legs to smack him in the face.

"I know you're comforted when you dream of butterflies even though you don't know why."

Pitch reeled back from the blow, eyes still wide. "Shut up!"

"And I know why the only nightmares you have are of a little girl screaming in the dark -"

It was the wrong thing to say. Pitch's expression changed from shock to rage with the speed of gasoline being set on fire.

"I said shut up! You know nothing! _Nothing_!"

A wave of shadows surged forward from behind Pitch and slammed Anansi into the wall so hard that he slumped to the ground unconscious.

As the spider myth thudded to the floor, Pitch turned away, shrugging off all that he'd said like it was nothing more than a bad dream.

Jack stood on the walkway, upright with great effort, but he stumbled a little as Pitch suddenly shifted from one shadow on the floor to emerge from a shadow falling over the walkway.

"Jack," said Pitch. The anger melted off his face like winter ending, and sympathy grew there like it was spring. The scythe melted away. He held out his arms, gesturing to the whole of the winter spirit with a helpless shrug. "You can't hope to fight me like this."

"I won't - I won't let you -"

But Jack was empty, his last burst of energy flowing away, taking his life with it. Jack fell to his knees.

The others couldn't help him. Bunny fought the chains that bound him above the floor. Anansi lay unconscious. Sandy banged away at the shadow-pinned vat, while Tooth grimaced against the noise, unable to free herself from Anansi's webs.

North wasn't a factor to consider anymore.

"I'm not going to kill them, Jack." Pitch's voice, usually so oily and sly, had gone flatly sincere. "That would be counterproductive, since I doubt you'd listen to me if I did."

"Why - what do you want?"

"I came for you, of course. My dear boy, it's always been about you."

Jack could only look at Pitch in confusion.

"I told you that the cold and the dark went well together," said Pitch, a shadow of a smile on his lips. "You weren't the only one who could provide half of the equation, and Old Man Winter believed I hated humanity enough not to interfere with his plans - but we both know Old Man Winter's winter isn't the winter the world needs, don't we?"

"I don't understand."

"I want them to live in fear," Pitch said, glee rising on his face as he stepped closer to Jack. "_Live _being the key word here. I can't have that if everyone has frozen to death. So I've come to offer you a chance to fix this - and to fix yourself. You don't have to die, Jack. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. How does that sound?"

"How can _you_ help _me_?" Jack asked, his voice brittle like an ice floe breaking into the sea.

"I can kill Old Man Winter for you. All this fear has made me strong enough to do it. If he dies, the power of the shards dies with him. They'll melt away, and you'll be safe and sound, free to take over where he left off."

"Why would I wanna take over where he left off?"

The corners of Pitch's mouth tweaked up. "Because you'd have to. You'd make an oath. One the Guardians have long since given up trying to get me to swear to."

"The Enkidu Oath. You want me to swear I'll join you in terrorizing the kids."

"I do need insurance. After all, if I were to go kill the Old Man, what's to stop you from reneging on the deal?"

Jack gripped his staff with a sudden burst of furious strength. "I won't do it."

Pitch dusted his nails on his long coat, like he was explaining the terms of a dry contract, and not practically ordering Jack to swear his center away. "You don't really have a choice. You stand no chance against me - none of you. North is dead- " Jack winced - "Jokul's winter is choking the life from the world, your heart is nearly frozen, and even if you die before he can devour your heart, that leaves just four Guardians to fight him when six couldn't finish the job. I am the only chance you have."

"And I'm the only chance you have," Jack said, catching onto that point like a lifeline. "You said it yourself. You can't have fear if there are no people here to fear you."

"True enough, but I wasn't lying entirely when I told Jokul I'd let them all rot. I'm not a Guardian, Jack - if the whole world dies, I still won't fade away. I'll wait - I'll travel the shadows - maybe find a new world to terrorize." His jagged teeth gleamed in a sudden, terrible smile. "Go on, Jack - do the heroic thing and save your world. Your winter may cast the world in darkness, but at least they'll be able to live in it." He held up a finger. "I'll tell you what. I'll even give you a reprieve once in a while - you can let the children play sometimes, Jack. The occasional_ snow day_."

Jack thought of the planet as the icy wasteland Old Man Winter wanted, devoid of life, himself and the Guardians faded, and knew Pitch was right. With Old Man Winter as strong as he was, joining Pitch might be the only way he could save humanity, even if it was to live in a world of fear.

He sucked in a deep breath as he gripped his staff. He could always disobey. After Old Man Winter was gone, he could refuse Pitch's orders and let the conditions of the oath strike him dead. The Guardians might be able to defeat Pitch if all the world's children weren't freezing under stormy skies.

Unless Pitch found some other leverage to hold over his head, first. And he could. If Pitch was strong enough to defeat Old Man Winter, then he was strong enough to defeat the Guardians - possibly quickly. Possibly - and more horribly - slowly.

"I won't do it."

Pitch's smile flickered out like a candle flame, his hairless brows knotting in frustration. "Why persist in caring for them? The children lost faith in you, Jack. They think you're capable of murder."

"He made them think -" Jack protested feebly.

"Jokul didn't _make_ them do anything. They chose to believe in you, and then they chose to believe you'd terrorize the world. Why try _so_ hard to curry for their favor when they're so fickle in the end?"

Jack opened his mouth to speak a reason - but just then, with his heart so cold, and all the world so dark, and the empty pit in his stomach still full of children speaking his name with disappointment - he couldn't find an answer.

"They're innocent," he said. "They didn't mean to do this."

"Children aren't innocent," Pitch spat. "They're _human_. They grow into petty, small-minded adults who watch the world fall apart without lifting a finger to stop it. Some of even grow up to tear it apart with their own hands."

"Not all of them."

"But enough of them," Pitch insisted. "Old Man Winter was a child once. The Tooth Fairy collected his teeth and the Sandman gave him his dreams, and look at what he is now. It's better to be feared than loved, when love is so false. Just because they can see you now doesn't mean they're going to remember you. They're going to grow up and forget you, and become the selfish, self-serving adults they were always destined to become. They're going to do everything they can to make the world ugly - and you can't ignore that ugliness anymore. Why do you think I take pride in giving them fear? I've lived long enough to see what they really are, Jack, and they're not worth this."

Jack stared down at the metal grating. A sharp, icy pain built in his chest as he sank to his knees. Pitch knelt down beside him.

"I wasn't lying when I said I believed in you." His voice was as soft as silk, as insidious as doubt. "You defy me, but you impress me - and I would much rather have you by my side than see you die."

It was right then that Bunny finally broke free of his chains, and dropped to the platform they stood on. Pitch surged to his feet, the shadows loomed up around him, and for a moment, Bunny looked at Jack, his expression pained.

He leapt off the grating before Pitch could attack, into a tunnel and out of the foundry, disappearing quick as a flash.

A strangled noise erupted from Jack's chest as the tunnel closed behind him, a cry too devastated to be a sob.

After all that Bunny had said, all the promises to defend Jack, he'd abandoned him the first moment he had the chance. To survive to fight Old Man Winter, no doubt - but it meant everything he'd said wasn't true. The promises meant nothing. The apologies, the overture of friendship - still, nothing.

Jack's heart constricted.

Pitch looked after the disappearing rabbit without surprise. "You see? Even the Guardians think you're disposable. Given the chance, they'll all abandon you in the end." His voice became soft again, like a parent trying to soothe their child. "But I will never leave you, Jack. I will never abandon you. I did all this - just to have you by my side."

The soft promise - the soft threat - hung heavy in the cold air.

Jack wheezed now, his chest numb and constricted, his view blurred through the tears nearly frozen in his eyes.

"Don't do this to yourself. Join me, and I promise, you'll never be alone again. You'll never be abandoned. You'll never feel unloved. I can be like a father to you, Jack."

Jack looked at Pitch with wide eyes, blurred with half-frozen tears, pain and loneliness building in his heart like a wave to sweep him away.

A voice from his past suddenly came to him, paired with the memory of a body. A calloused hand, held in his own. His mother weeping.

_"Your father loved you, Jack,"_ said the mother of his memory, her voice filled with tears. _"He loved you so much. I know this is hard but what's most important is that you know how much he loved you." _

Just as North had said.

_"Either way, only one thing is important, only one thing matters..." _

_"What? What thing?" _

_"That you know you are cared for, Jack. That is worth a life." _

He shut his eyes on warm tears.

"I already had a father," he said, "and I think - I think I maybe already had someone else who was just like one." He looked up at Pitch, defiant even through his pain, fear, and exhaustion. "He said he'd wait for me."

Pitch's entreating expression dropped.

Jack shook his head. "I won't hurt people and live as something I'm not. I'd rather die like North - as what I am."

Pitch breathed in a disappointed sigh. "I'll admit, that's not the answer I was hoping for."

With a movement almost too quick to see, he slapped Jack's staff out of his hand and slammed Jack to the grating, hand around his throat, choking him just enough to hurt.

"If that's the case, then I'm going to deliver your frozen heart to the Old Man _myself_," Pitch hissed, as he pressed his fingers into Jack's throat. "You brought this on yourself. It didn't have to be this way. But since this is your choice -" Pitch leaned in close, with all the intimate affection of a parent about to kiss their child on the forehead when tucking them in. He looked into Jack's eyes as if he planned to watch the life fade out of them -"I want fear to be the very last thing you -"

He didn't get to finish the sentence, because a boot hit him in the head.

Pitch let go of Jack's throat as he fell away, gobsmacked outrage on his face. Jack couldn't help it. Even as he lay wheezing with breathless pain, he laughed - harsh, croaking laughter - at the Nightmare King's expression.

"I remember something like that from last year, too," called a familiar voice, with a familiar Down Under accent.

"Leave him alone, Pitch!" shouted _another_ familiar voice, and the sound of it set a brief blaze warming Jack's heart. He looked behind him, his expression suddenly bright.

"Jamie!"

"Oh, for the love of -" Pitch lifted a hand to the bruise on his face. "_You_ again?"

Standing over to the side, sans one snow boot, looking incredibly, protectively irate, was none other than Jamie Bennett. Bunny stood next to him, arms crossed, grinning.

"Seeing as we were all getting stonkered, I thought I'd bring in a little backup."

Jamie launched himself at Pitch. The Nightmare King pulled his scythe together, the shadows sweeping into night-mares and monstrous creature-shapes, but Jamie barreled through, each touch of his hand stripping away the fear that held them together. The horrors dissolved into golden dreamsand. As Jamie closed in, Pitch swung his scythe, but even that dissolved into a spray of gold as the blade came down on Jamie's hands.

Pitch stumbled back, weaponless, as Jamie picked up Jack's staff, and proceeded to smack Pitch with it.

Repeatedly.

"Ow! Stop it, you miserable - ow!"

Jack shook, sobbing, where he lay on the floor. Bunny lunged over and knelt beside him.

"Jack, mate, you alright?"

"Go help the others," Jack sobbed.

"But you're - "

"A mess right now, I know," Jack gasped out. He rolled onto his back, convulsing - but not with sadness. "Did you see Pitch get hit with the boot?"

Bunny couldn't stop the grin that stole over his face. "Too right I did."

"That was -" Jack paused to laugh, his raucous hysterics easily mistaken for sobs. "Hilarious. Go help the others."

Bunny loped off, as Jack once again got a full view of Pitch being beaten with a stick by a nine-year-old boy. He rolled on the floor in mirth.

"Ow, stop! I said - stop it! You miserable little - ow! I'm the King of All - ouch, would you stop that?!"

"You!" _Thwack!_ "Are!" _Thwack! _"A big!" _Thwack! _"Giant!" _Thwack! _"Jerk! Stay away from Jack!" _Thwack! _

"Listen, boy, I'm -"

"You're finished, Pitch," said Tooth. She flitted over, free and armed again, hovering beside Jamie. By the vat that still held Sandy, Anansi rubbed his head as he returned to consciousness, and Bunny stamped a tunnel between them and the interior of the vat. Sandy emerged in less than a second, his fingers tight around his sand whips. The ferocity on the little man's face as he stormed forward would have frightened even the most stoic of enemies.

The Guardians advanced on the Nightmare King, now bruised and bleeding from Jamie's assault, but it wasn't he Guardians he seemed to fear the most - not even Sandy. It was Jamie that he tried to keep his distance from. He had led the other children in destroying all his nightmare sand - and was now older, stronger, and even braver than before. This was a boy far less hesitant to go on the attack. (Clearly.)

The Guardians Pitch could handle, but the Guardians and one child who had already conquered fear - not so much.

"And when this is done, after we've taken out the Old Man," said Bunny, gesturing with his boomerang. "You're next."

"You're going to regret this, Jack," Pitch called. He retreated, through the broken wall of the foundry, into the shadows it cast on the snow.

"Nooo I'm not," said Jack flippantly. "Boot to the head. Worth it for the boot to the head."

"He's going to devour your heart," were the last lingering words that filtered back from the shadows. "Winter will never end!"

Jamie lifted his left foot, dropping Jack's staff on the floor within easy reach of the winter spirit. "I have another boot, you know!"

The last of the black sand drifted away, and Pitch was gone. Bunny raced to the edge of the wrecked foundry wall, sniffing for a sign of him.

"He's run," he said, with confidence, turning back just in time to see Jack stand, leaning heavily on his staff,

"That was great. You guys are great," Jack said distantly. His smile was thin and wispy, and the tears of laughter on his face froze solid again. "I think it's okay now. I'm freezing over, but I think it's okay. My heart might not freeze now."

He fell, the last of his strength giving out all at once.

"Jack!" Jamie dropped the staff and knelt by Jack's head. The brief moment of triumph shattered as the Guardians all gathered around him. "Jack, hey, come on, I just got here. We still have to figure out the saving-the-day stuff, okay? And that includes the saving your sorry frosty butt stuff. Again."

"Sorry, kiddo," Jack said faintly. "Not this time."

Jack reached out with his frost-covered hand and weakly mussed Jamie's hair, leaving some of the frost behind like snowy dandruff.

"I'm so proud of you. You're so brave. I wasn't just being schmaltzy when I said you were a Guardian, too, y'know."

The ice crept farther over Jack's body, and the others all gathered around as if it were something they could ward off with the warmth of their own bodies. But their presence did nothing - the ice continued to creep.

"_No_," said Bunny, horror in his voice. Jamie, heroic little Jamie with one boot off and one boot on, had already started crying. Jack could see him folded up in Anansi's legs, like the spider Guardian was trying to protect him from Jack's death.

Jack barely felt Bunny picking him up. He shifted Jack away from Jamie and Anansi, breaking the ice off Jack by hand. It was only a sign of how deep the cold had reached, that Jack couldn't feel - anything, not the paws melting ice from his hair, or the ice being broken off his skin.

But it touched him, even if he couldn't feel it. The part of him that could not be warmed anymore still saw Bunny trying to hold back what couldn't be held, clearing ice that was only a symptom of the curse that would kill him.

"It's okay," Jack whispered, his lips numb, his words slurred softly around them. "It's alright. You can stop."

"Like hell I can. We're not losing two Guardians in one day."

His voice cracked on the "two." Their tragedies had come too quickly to be dealt with in the time they deserved.

Still, this was the harshest language he'd ever heard from Bunny, or at least the harshest that wasn't some nearly unintelligible Australian slang. It actually made Jack laugh, a little bit.

"Language, Bunny, there's a kid here," he said. "I don't hurt anymore. I don't feel anything. I just know I should feel - happy. That you care. That all of you tried - that you're trying so hard now -"

Tooth buried her face in her hands. Her face was wet with tears when she looked up. Bunny had stopped scraping, his expression stricken.

"I don't feel anything," Jack repeated, his voice faint, floating. "But I know if I could - if I could feel anything right now - I'd feel loved. I don't know what we were supposed to do...but if it was as simple as just loving someone, I know - I know it's not because you don't. It's because we missed something."

With sorrow deep on his face, Sandy released a handful of sand into the air above their heads. The sand coalesced into tiny stars and orbiting planets that dissolved into birds that plunged into a sea and came out again as dolphins. There was still some beauty in the sight, and Jack knew that was the whole point. Sandy's last gift to him, a final comfort.

The very faintest ember flared in Jack's heart, and for a brief second, he wished he could dry Tooth's face, and stop the tears welling in Bunny's eyes. He wished he could comfort Jamie, sobbing quietly behind him, or do something to counter the sorrow on Sandy's face. That empathy vanished with the spark. But at least he'd gotten to feel it, even as the end pushed at the edges of his vision

If he did feel anything at all, it was a strange sort of happiness he knew it probably wasn't normal to feel when he was dying, but it was a novel thing to him, being loved enough to be missed. There had been times that Jack thought it was something he'd never have, and it made him so happy that he almost didn't mind the dying part. That probably said some pretty revealing things about his psyche, but whatever. No time to worry about it now.

"No," Bunny insisted again, bundling Jack to his chest, doubled over him like he could still thaw him out. Jack could hear his heart, beating frantically, a sound so full of life as he was so close to death. "Jack, there's still hope. There's still hope if you just hang on. Hope never dies. It never stops. It never leaves you alone - and neither will I."

"Bunny," said Tooth, softly, putting her tear-soaked hand on Bunny's paw. She flinched back when proximity to Jack froze the tears on her skin.

"Not like this," Bunny insisted, looking at her as he scraped the ice from Jack's arms, his defiance and desperate sadness threatening to boil over. "Not to him -"

The next words came out in a heart-sick croak, "Not again."

Tooth pressed her hands against her streaming eyes and Jamie's sobbing redoubled.

"Hey," Jack said, "I've got plenty of hope. For you. We didn't get to have those laughs, like you said - but I would've liked to. I hope you'll get to have those laughs, even if it's not with me. I hope - I have hope you'll get to have fun with someone, even after I go. Otherwise Old Man Winter really will have won. You were pretty fun, too - don't let him kill that, too, alright?"

Bunny's expression was utterly stricken, but he stopped trying to hold back the ice, his paws raw from the cold, fur frozen, shivering himself. He still didn't let Jack go.

Jack felt he frost creeping. "I need..."

"What do you need, Jack?" asked Tooth.

"My heart. I need - something -"

"It may help you keep your heart if you think about something in this world that is still beautiful to you," Anansi offered gently.

Slowly, Jack's eyes flickered over to Tooth's face.

Moved by this, more tears rolling down her cheeks, she took his hand and pressed a gentle kiss to his fingers. The cold burned her tears into solid ice on her skin, but she held his hand as she wept.

Jack knew some writers had written about how beautiful girls were when they cried. It was just a thing in some stories, beautiful, sad girls. Jack understood it less than ever as Tooth wept. He was glad she cared that much about him, but he hated that she was in pain. He hated that she was going to lose two people she cared about today. She was much more beautiful when she smiled and he was never going to see her smile again.

But she was still beautiful. Despite the shards, despite the snot and the splotchiness, despite the shadows creeping in on his vision, she was beautiful. As far as last sights went, he couldn't think of anything he wanted to see more than Tooth looking down at him, her head crowned by golden stars floating overhead.

The frost settled, suddenly, deep into his flesh. His body stiffened, his eyes still open, as he felt the last creeping cold begin its final penetration to his heart. Whether his heart froze or not, the rest of him was about to.

They all leaned in, each holding their breaths, whether they needed to breathe or not.

His eyes froze open, a thin film of ice rendering his vision wavy, turning his friends into blurs as darkness crept in from the edges of his vision to cover his sight.

* * *

No one spoke as Bunny curled around Jack again, holding his stiffly frozen form close, head down to cover the tears welling in his eyes. Tooth covered her face again, her feathers already soaked. Her crying was raw, her ability to reign it in completely stripped away by the losses they had endured today.

Jamie buried his face in Anansi's shoulder.

His human arms were still protectively around Jamie, but Anansi was looking at a few strands of web stretched between his spider legs, frowning.

He looked up from the tiny story and sighed audibly out.

"Well," he said, relinquishing Jamie to Sandy's care. "- At least you brought him hope before he died."

A moment of silence balanced on a spider's web between them.

"My friend," said Bunny, slowly, his voice laced with unspeakable despair and rising anger - "is dead in my arms, and you think _anything_ can make me feel better?"

"Well, hope _is_ your thing," said Anansi. "Think of how much sadder this story would be if you hadn't managed to give him any."

Bunny choked back a sob. He curled around Jack again, and the tears that had gathered in his eyes finally fell, landing in Jack's open, staring eyes.

The tears didn't freeze on contact.

In fact, they melted the layer of ice over Jack's eyes.

Then they melted more than that.

Jack blinked, once, twice, as the hateful shards melted away with the tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. He sucked in a ragged breath, reaching for Bunny and Tooth.

"Jack?" Bunny said, leaning back to look at the suddenly-living spirit. The ice all over Jack's body cracked and slid away, melting through the holes in the grate. Tooth wiped the ice from his hair as they crowded around him hopefully.

Jack blinked twice more in confusion, and looked up at them all.

"I'm kinda not dead." Kinda because, after all, he had already been dead to begin with. "What's that about?"

Tooth laughed in delight and wrapped her arms around him in a hug, one that became very crowded as Bunny and Sandy started hugging him, too.

"Holy Dooley! Jack, you're alright! You're alright!" Bunny exclaimed joyously. Ice slid off him as Bunny pounded on his back like he was trying to break Jack free of Antarctica.

Sandy and Jamie crowded the hug too. Jamie whooped and accidentally stomped on Jack's foot with (fortunately) his own unshod one.

"Seriously," Jack said, muffled by the mass of people hugging him. "The not-dying thing. What happened there?"

"The tears! Of course!" Anansi exclaimed. "They're an expression of grief, derived from love. Yemaya's domain is water, so of course she'd understand this was so. But to tell you that was the cure might have made the cure impossible. How does one shed tears of love on command, after all?"

"So wait, I blanked out at the end of it there. Who cried on me?" Jack sat up, looking expectantly at Tooth and Jamie.

"We were all crying, but Bunny was the one that cried in your eyes," said Jamie as he pulled back enough to be heard, the frosty material of Jack's hoodie adhering momentarily to his cheeks.

Jack looked at Bunny, his expression threatening to brim over with touched emotion.

And sarcasm.

"Aw, you really _do_ care," Jack joked. "Since all this came on with me being hurt, should I maybe limp a little to keep the friendship train a'rollin?"

"Rack off, you overgrown popsicle," Bunny jibed back, but he couldn't keep up with the faux annoyance for more than two seconds before he was hugging Jack again.

Sandy tapped Jack to get his attention and a complex series of flickering images appeared over his head. For once, Jack was able to parse it, especially since one of them looked like a dark cloud over a figure that looked like Jack, signifying all the darkness he'd seen in the world under the influence of the shards.

"I'm okay, Sandy. It's gone, all of it. I can't say I'm feeling one hundred percent here, but my sight is back to normal. Bunny's tears did the trick, I guess."

Jack suddenly froze in place, but it wasn't from the shards this time. "The cure was tears. The cure was _tears_. If the cure was tears then -"

A crack of lightning struck outside, halving the sky. A massive, snowy figure loomed by the broken wall of the foundry. The Guardians jumped to formation, ready to fight Old Man Winter's snowmen -

- Then the figure shook itself, snow flying every which way, falling from red fur and a long white beard.

"Jack," said North, "why you leave me in snow?"

Laughter bubbled out of Jack, with unrestrained joy. He launched himself at North, throwing his arms around the old saint's shoulders.

"North!" Tooth exclaimed, flying over happily to join the hug. The Sandman bounced over to do the same, patting North happily on the back.

"I thought you were dead!" Jack exclaimed.

"Interesting thing," said North reflectively, as if pondering a riddle. "I was thinking that, too. Then suddenly I am awake, and finding my way back through storm. Very difficult in such visibility. What happened?"

"The cure was tears," said Jack. "When I thought you were gone, I went crazy with the waterworks. I must've walked away before you really woke up."

"Ah, love of friend for friend! Very powerful thing," said North, giving Jack and extra-hard squeeze. "You're feeling better yourself?"

"Thanks to Bunny, I'm right as rain - which, for now, is a big improvement over snow."

"Bunny, get over here," said Tooth.

"Don't have to tell me twice," said Bunny. He hoisted Jamie onto his shoulder and bounded down, the boy whooping with delight as they bounced from machine to machine and into yet another Guardian group hug.

The crushing despair that had threatened to overwhelm them - and _had_ overwhelmed them - was blowing away, like so much powder in a gale. It was hard to believe that they had stood up underneath the weight of it - elation filled Jack like a gust of fresh air, and the sense of being whole, himself again, was almost too much to endure without laughing, whooping, crying. Too much, in all the best ways.

Jamie pressed his face into Jack's midsection, and Jack ruffled his hair affectionately. "Not bad, for your second Guardian mission."

Jamie giggled. "So what's _my_ center, smacking Pitch with a stick?"

Laughter bubbled from Jack like a stream, flowing beneath swiftly melting ice. "Right now, that seems like the best center anyone could have."

He sensed something behind him, a prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck, and he looked over his shoulder to see Anansi, again eyeing the Guardian group hug like it was prey he hadn't yet figured out how to catch.

Ah, why not?

"You get in here too," Jack called, letting go of North to open his arm to Anansi. After all, Anansi_ had_ taken a beating in his defense. Maybe it was time to let the spider in on the group hugs. Anansi beamed his gleaming grin, and threaded his human arms around North and Jack - then wrapped all eight of his spider legs around all the Guardians at once, compressing them in a firm, hard-shelled hug.

"Haha, you see, I have won at hugging," he crowed, as he gave the whole group an affectionate (and competitive) squeeze. "I can hug all of you at once, whereas each of you can only hug a few with your two arms!"

"It's not a competition," Jack said, his voice muffled where his mouth was pressed against Anansi's shoulder.

"And it is not a competition in which the Spider triumphs again," Anansi declared. Bunny groaned in the background.

"So, you're Anansi, right?" Jamie spoke up. "Are you a Guardian too? Or are you just helping out?"

Anansi released the group with surprise, caught off-guard for the first time Jack had ever seen.

He knelt down, lifting his sunglasses to his forehead to speak to Jamie. "How is it that a boy so far removed from my lands knows my name?"

"After last year I started reading up on myths," said Jamie, "just in case. My school library has this book of African Spider Stories - the legs kind of gave it away."

Anansi smiled, and again, it was the first time Jack had seen him smile without looking even the slightest bit the intimidator.

"Brilliant boy," he said, his voice rich with appreciation. "Yes, I am a Guardian. The Guardian of Stories. And I should tell you, there are many who will know your story, Jamie Bennet, and admire it as I have."

"Hey, thanks," said Jamie, beaming under the compliment from the ancient mythic figure - a circumstance he was becoming accustomed to. "Can I tell my friends about you, or is it a secret?"

"The Guardian of Stories is a secret no longer," Anansi said to the boy. "You may tell whoever you want."

"Okay," said Jamie. "But - maybe you guys should go back to making sure I _get _to tell everyone?" He looked from Guardian to Guardian, a shadow of worry back on his face. "Things are getting kind of bad back home."

Tooth shivered.

"He's right," she said. "I can feel it from my fairies. Whatever we do next, it has to be soon. The temperature's dropping and the weather's starting to hurt my fairies."

"If it's hurting your fairies, it's hurting people," said Bunny. "That means we need to act fast."

"Then we gather our forces, attack now," said North. "I will recall Yeti, Bunny, you will summon giant egg-stone-things, Tooth -"

"No," Bunny interrupted. "It won't work like that, North. Remember what happened last time."

"Yes, but now we are prepared," North said, gesturing to Jack and Anansi. "We have our ranks restored - we even have new force among us. The time has never been better to strike."

Bunny shook his head. "I wasn't talking about _that_ last time."

They all looked at him blankly, but Tooth's eyebrows quirked up with understanding first. Jack caught on a moment later.

"Last time, there was someone out there bringing everyone hope," Jack put in. Bunny nodded to him. "It made Old Man Winter weak, made him go to sleep."

"If we want to stand a chance, we have to bring hope to the children again," Bunny went on. "Hope that spring will come - or at least, that they'll survive the night."

"Then you will go and do this," said North, thinking he'd caught on. "While Bunny is again bringing hope to the world, we will wear Old Man Winter down, same as before! Plus one," he added to Anansi. "We are sure to succeed."

Bunny shook his head again. "No. There's another way. I can't be in more than one place at once, but all of you can. And people need help right now, in a lot more places than one."

North stopped trying to advance his tactics. "Where are you going with this?"

"Someone's got to help the people," said Bunny, "and someone's got to keep Old Man Winter distracted. We have to do this, the same as before. Only this time -" he looked meaningfully at the other Guardians. "I need your help to bring _me_ hope. Only one of us has gotten a good crack in on Old Man Winter since he woke up, and it's not any of you."

Sandy shook his head. Yellow pictograms appeared over his head, showing Old Man Winter at the center of a vicious storm, the depths of his power clear. Bunny fought him and while it was a valiant fight, he was struck down and then Old Man Winter struck down the other Guardians, one by one.

What he was trying to say was clear: Old Man Winter was too powerful, and if Bunny faced him alone, they'd just be struck down one by one. Sandy clearly thought Bunny shouldn't face Old Man Winter alone.

"No," Bunny insisted, "he won't kill me, Sandy. Not if you're out there, backing me up. Tooth, you can feel what's going on out there - can you tell me honestly that if we all go and face him, right now, that people who need your help won't freeze without it?"

"We can't let you do this," Tooth insisted. "I can't even begin to imagine how much you must want to get revenge on him, but this is _not_ -"

"I never expected to get back at him," Bunny insisted. "I never expected - Tooth, revenge is _not_ something I ever hoped for. Revenge and hope don't go well together."

He took her hand with one paw, and looked her dead in the eye so she could see - not how much he was looking forward to this showdown, but how afraid he was to do it.

"Even if I'd ever thought I could get revenge on him one day, what good would revenge have ever done me? It wouldn't have undone any of his damage. This isn't about vengeance. This just makes sense. He was weak in the foundry, and he wasn't holding back, but I was - now that he's refused the Oath, I don't have to. Spring overcomes winter - I don't know if I can overcome him, but I think I can hold him off long enough for the rest of you to save everyone."

Tooth stared at her friend eye-to-eye, pressing her lips together as she considered the information from her fairies, shivering in places where they shouldn't have been anything less than balmy.

Sandy and North drew up behind her, their expressions equally drawn.

"C'mon," said Bunny. "It's just like before - just the other way 'round." He cracked a smile that quickly faded. "I need your help."

"He's right," said Jack to the others, trying to draw them over to Bunny's point of view. "He's got to do the work of all the Guardians, but he can, and we've got to do the work of one little Bunny - which will take all of us to do. 'There's a time for everything and everything in it's time.' Certain things need to just _be_ sometimes, and last time he had his role and this time he has it, too. It's time for winter to give way to spring, just like Yemaya said."

Bunny looked at Jack with gratitude. "We've got to get you taken care of, as well," he said. He loped over to Jack looking apologetic. "I know I said I'd stick around to make sure Old Man Winter didn't get to you, but -"

"Someone's got to keep the Old Man busy," Jack finished. "I can't do much to help anyone right now, if I don't do something about Old Man Winter having all my belief. But I think I've got an idea about that."

He turned to Jamie. "So I already owe you after you gave Pitch the boot - literally - but I need your help again."

"Okay, but if it involves throwing more boots, I kinda want to get an extra so my foot isn't cold."

Jack laughed. "No, this involves something else. Do you think you can gather up your friends if I take you back home?"

"Actually, everyone is stuck at school. That's where Bunny got me. It's snowed in."

"That's perfect. Everyone's in one place. See, I had this idea. Belief makes us powerful, but it can also change what we can do," he said, looking at Bunny. "With Old Man Winter's ego being what it is, then this plan might actually work..."

* * *

_"Centuries before, the Guardians took flight in another snowstorm, but not to seek Old Man Winter._

_The Sandman, the Tooth Fairy, and Nicholas St. North followed a smaller, fainter trail than the one plowed by Old Man Winter from one pole to another. Their quarry's trail was left in flowers peeking through the snow, eggs on windowsills, tiny footprints that disappeared beneath the falling snow so quickly that they were almost impossible to track. Only when they saw the little prints vanishing quickly did they know they'd come within finding distance of their quarry._

_The snow fell in the leafless Romanian wood silently, the wind, for the moment, still, and the snow was almost beautiful - it would have been beautiful, if the snow were not three feet deeper than it should have been on March the 23rd._

_North broke the silence with a sharp yell of triumph as a grey blur whisked past him into a stand of stones, and he galumphed in the direction of the movement - "Toothy! Sandy! Eyes over - _ow_!"_

_North touched his temple where a smallish wooden projectile glanced off his forehead and spun away, pausing just long enough for the small grey blur to shoot past. But the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman had already zipped into place and the little streak of movement stopped between them, a tiny rabbit, glancing from one to the other for signs of escape and seeing none, before even looking to see what he was escaping from._

_"Back off!" it shouted, raising a rabbit-sized boomerang, standing in the snow on its hindquarters, other paw outstretched between Tooth and the Sandman and the egg-filled basket slung around its midsection, which was too big for it. "I know how to use this!" _

_"And I am believing it," said North, touching his head where the boomerang had raised a small goose egg. "I was not expecting such a foe in an opponent who could fit inside my boot." _

_The rabbit-shaped creature shot a quick glare at North, but his eyes widened further as he recognized who he was threatening. _

_"You're the Guardians." He stepped back, lowering the boomerang with a lot of surprise and a little bit of awe. "What are you doing here?"_

_The Tooth Fairy moved slowly closer, snow sparkling in the veiled sun as it landed on her feathers. "I think we're looking for you," she said, and when the rabbit backed away a step, twitchy and nervous, she knelt in the snow. "Are you the one who's been leaving gifts for the children?"_

_The rabbit nodded. "They found them?" His voice was hopeful. "The gifts - the children found them all right?"_

_"They found them," said the Tooth Fairy, her smile reassuring. "They're very grateful. My fairies overheard their thanks."_

_"I was afraid the snow might have covered them as soon as I left." The rabbit's relief was palpable. "Thank you." But the moment of relief was short lived, as his ears twitched nervously, and he looked around. "Look, it's an honor, but I can't stop to talk. Excuse me –"_

_"Wait, please," the Tooth Fairy requested, and the rabbit paused, already half-departed between North and Sandy. "Who are you? One of the pookas, right? Are the rest also out working?"_

_North and Sandman crowded in closer behind Tooth, as the rabbit, stricken, shook his head._

_"It's just me. Old Man Winter attacked the Warren. The rest –"_

_He trailed off, and all three Guardians inhaled in shock and understanding._

_He looked at the egg cradled in his tiny paws, and in spite of the work he had to do, remained still a moment. "It's a miracle the warren is producing anything, even a little." _

_He paused. "Who am I? I guess I'm the Easter Bunny, now."_

_Unspeakable loss was written on his features._

_Tooth lifted her hand to her mouth, considering for a moment the idea of having to work without – or worse, to live without – her them, her duties would have been tremendously more difficult, and her palace, unbearably lonely. Because of them, she felt the shadow of the rabbit's devastation more clearly than the others – better than Sandman, who had always worked alone, and North, whose helpers were allies, not family._

_She felt how difficult it must have been for him to keep on doing what he was – carrying out the work of a thousand._

_The Easter Bunny shook himself out of his fugue. "I really have to go."_

_"Of course," said Tooth, rising from the snow. "But – Bunny, wait –"_

_The rabbit turned back one more time._

_"We'll keep Old Man Winter distracted," she said. "If we keep him busy and you keep doing what you're doing – we might have a chance."_

_"Teeny chance," echoed glared briefly at him, the same time the rabbit did. "But still! A chance at all is good!"_

_The Easter Bunny looked back at the Tooth Fairy, and smiled, with real encouragement. _

_"That's the hope, isn't it?" he said, and was gone._

_The Tooth Fairy clenched her graceful hands into fists around the hilts of her swords. None of the three of them had any illusions that there would be no hard battle against the King of the Cold Mountain in their future, but the sudden reminder of his cruel ambition, and the scope of his evil, steeled all their resolve._

_"Is very much work," said North, scratching his beard, looking after the rabbit tracks, which were already fading beneath the falling snow. "For one small bunny to be doing. Even I cannot make Christmas without help."_

_"Then let's help him," the Tooth fairy had said, ferocity in her expression. The snow all those years ago blanketed the world as the Guardians went, together, to face Old Man Winter, and the last pooka faced the task of an Easter by himself."_

"Anansi," said Tooth as she flew alongside him, the Spider floating on a web parachute bearing him through the sky, while the Sandman carried North beside them on a dreamsand cloud. "Who are you talking to? We already know that story. We were there."

Anansi, fresh off his tale telling, beamed his gleaming grin. "Forgive me, dear Queen. The timing screamed for it."

* * *

Now, in the Warren that was green and growing again, the Easter Bunny knelt and spread his paw across the grass.

"There's a time for everything, and everything in its time," he murmured, as much to the Warren as much as to himself. "And it's time for us to give it all we've got. Like we never have before."

The Sentinel Eggs stood at attention in a semicircle around him, swaying slightly, their neutral faces ready to spin on a dime. They stayed poised by the tunnels that lead to the world as Bunnymund stood, armed again with two boomerangs.

The bringer of countless springs was no longer small and no longer frightened – and as before, as he charged from his home to bring hope, he wasn't alone.


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N**: Sorry for the wait. Aside from a new job and new health problems on my (Saphie's part) there was a lot we were trying to do with this chapter - and a lot that got cut and put aside for the last chapter.

After this, there's just a chapter for the conclusion. Hope you enjoy the final showdown!

There were actually too many wonderful reviews last time to really respond to any individually, so just have a great big thank you from the authors. We really have enjoyed the feedback we've gotten from this story and are so glad people were entertained by it. We hope once the last chapter of this one is up and we start the next in the series that you'll keep staying with us for the ride.

* * *

**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders, Kaylin, and Saph

* * *

**Chapter 8**

Jokul Frosti built his latest fortress, not in Antarctica as he once had, but in the Himalayas, just to be a jerk about it. His fortress nestled in a jagged canyon where the wind whipped through the mountains with a noise like it was in pain. It soothed the old man's frazzled nerves.

"Not that my nerves are particularly frazzled," he said, to his latest companion. "What with one victory after another. A world covered with ice, North and the Frost kid should be thiiiis close to dead if they aren't already -" he picked at the chunks of steel still bonded to his skin, which was far more hideously mottled since his dip in the molten metal. "The steel coat isn't a bad look, either. Does it look steampunk, do you think? Steampunk's in right now."

The companion didn't answer. It wasn't much of a talker, being a snow leopard frozen in a solid block of ice.

"Yeah, you're right. I never cared much for punk anyway. And steam! Don't get me started, Jacob. You like Jacob? I think it fits. Rolls off the tongue well."

The wind screamed outside, and Jokul Frosti sighed with contentment as he settled into his icy throne.

"At the risk of playing to type, Jacob, it's good to be the king."

Which was precisely the moment the high back of the icy throne shattered, raining fragments down on Old Man Winter's head. A now-familiar boomerang finished its course arcing through the fortress, and Bunnymund caught it in the jagged window where he stood waiting.

"You again?" Old Man Winter brushed ice from his lap, looking angry at first, but his anger quickly turned to a sly grin as Bunny jumped down from the windowsill. "Come to avenge your little frost friend? Or are you here to beg for a cure? Oh tell me it's the begging one. I can't wait to tell you_there is no cure_ and laugh about it. Where's the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman? And the creepy spider guy? Lagging behind in the storm, huh?"

"I'm not here for Frost," said Bunny, standing steady on the ice of the palace floor as Old Man Winter walked slowly down the glittering steps to his icy throne. "He's long past anyone's help. It's just you and me, Old Man. I'm here on personal business."

"Oh, now this is an unexpected twist. The prancey dancey rabbit has come to _me_ on a personal matter? What's the deal, rabbit - are you defecting? Come to plead your way to the winning side?"

Bunny let out a scoff that was much too amused for Old Man Winter's liking.

"You still don't get it?" he asked. "All this time and you haven't figured out who I am. What a surprise - I'd assumed the great Old Man Winter could tell Christmas from Bourke Street."

"Sleeping in the ice doesn't really give you much time to keep up with the social circuit," Old Man Winter said, waving a jagged-nailed hand, narrowing his eyes at the slangy insult he'd just barely understood. "But hey, if we're doing introductions, why not let me go first?"

He delivered an exaggerated bow as he reached the bottom step below his throne. "Jokul Frosti. The King of the Cold Mountain. Which will very soon be the Cold _World_ - oh - I'd say about two minutes from now, when this conversation ends and I wipe the ice with your pelt. But I'm being rude, spelling out your death when I don't even know your name, Mr. -?"

"Bunnymund," he said, his tone flat. Old Man Winter snickered, but he went on. "I'm called Bunnymund."

"Dignified, real dignified, _Bunnymund_," Old Man Winter said, his voice mocking. "You think I haven't figured out what you are? You're what came about after the boy put me to sleep, when enough kids hadn't had the hope beaten out of them to stop believing in Easter. I'll admit, for a dance-fighting rabbit, you're not a _total _snooze, but you really should check yourself before I wreck yourself - which is going to happen, whether you check yourself or not."

Jokul Frosti walked languidly in a half-circle that Bunny mirrored, his every move as casual as the rabbit's was not. "You think you're so much more impressive than you are, but really, you're just a stopgap. A void filled! You think just because in that quiet after the storm when the other winter spirit let spring come back, you can take me down. Well I've got to point something out to you -" He spread his arms, grinning widely, the steel and ice cracking on his frame. "I'm _Old Man Winter_. I am the cold death, given form. Just who do you think you are, that you stand a spark's chance in a blizzard against me?"

Old Man Winter's smile dropped as Bunny's dark chuckle echoed through the cavern.

"That's the best you've come up with?" he said, his own sardonic grin giving way to a hard-set glare. "Slight problem with your reasoning - Jack is only a little over 300 years old. You went to sleep - how long ago? A lot more than three hundred - anyone can tell you that. Jack wasn't alive then. So tell me again, _who _put you to sleep?"

Old Man Winter looked abjectly confused, then narrowed his eyes. "Okay, what, I don't even know where you're going with this anymore."

"You tried to destroy spring," Bunny went on, spelling it out for him. "You attacked the place where Spring was born, destroyed all the plants, all the creatures -" his voice broke with disbelief. "Did you even know who lived there?"

Old Man Winter rolled his eyes. "What is this, a pop quiz? News flash, I destroyed it, it's gone, who ca -"

"WHO?" Bunny shouted. "LIVED THERE?"

"Ugh, jeeze!" Old Man Winter threw his hands up in the air. "Some birds, bugs, a bunch of dumb little rabbit fairies, but I killed -"

His voice dropped off, and his eyes widened.

"- them all," he finished.

The six-foot rabbit in front of him drew himself up with anger and pride. "_You missed one_."

It was like watching a house of cards fall, if the cards were made of ice that splintered into knives. For a second Old Man Winter stared, frozen - then his face split into a grimace of outrage. The ice of the fortress groaned around them as if it were suddenly too heavy for the mountain that held it.

He shouted with a mix of anger and indignation, That's stupid! That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard! For one little pooka to take me out, he'd have to -"

"Have millions believing in him, alone?" Bunny pointed at Old Man Winter with one boomerang. "_You_ saw to that!"

"You're lying!" Old Man Winter's scream cracked with fury. "No one believed in spring anymore! There was _no hope_ left. Not with the winter I made! Only a trickster could have stolen enough of my power -"

"Oh, _tell_ me it stings, Old Man," Bunny growled, with a vindictive hiss. "You were powerful - you were feared - but all it took to undo the fear was_one tiny spark_ of hope. And now you've spent all this time chasing after a kid who never even knew you existed, while the one who took you out all those years ago has been preparing to put you away for good. _Tell _me that hurts you, because I've had a _long _time to want to see you hurting."

"The boy stole my name!" Old Man Winter clung to his story, as the fortress groaned as if in agony. "He _let_ you bring spring back!"

"Nobody let me do anything!" Bunny shouted. "I did it, myself! Every body buried, every seed planted, every shred of hope delivered – I did it all, and it was more than your cold, more than your darkness. _I_ put you to sleep, Old Man. Me. Alone, with as little hope as you could leave in the world – but there will _never_ be too little hope to put you back in the ice where you belong."

"You think that was the worst of winter?" Old Man Winter raised his hands, the sweeping gesture pulling dry, whipping winds around him. "You're nothing but an unfinished job!"

He lifted his hands, ice sculptures erupting from the floor around him, snow pouring in through the windows and coalescing into snowmen bearing needle-sharp teeth.

Bunny crouched in his stance, tapping the ground. Holes dropped out of the ice around him. Sentinel eggs erupted from the tunnels, their faces grinding to frowns.

"This ends now," Old Man Winter growled, the wind carrying his soft voice through the mountains. "No one will believe in spring anymore."

"Keep telling yourself that," Bunnymund shouted over the wind. "Do you know who I am yet, Old Man? I'm the Easter Bunny. People - believe - in _me!_"

Old Man Winter's howl of rage shook the mountain as spring and winter went to war.

* * *

It was getting awfully cold in the auditorium. The school's creaky older heaters were having trouble keeping the classrooms warm, so the children had been gathered up in the auditorium, which somehow was always warmer than it should have been, in the hopes that the lack of windows would help keep the heat from getting sapped away by the storm raging outside.

Most of the kids had their coats, hats, and gloves with them, and the teachers were no longer talking about getting the kids home. Now they were discussing the logistics of "Where are we going to have them sleep?" and "How are we going to keep them warm?" in voices that weren't quite quiet enough.

Pippa sat at one of the chairs at the front of the auditorium near the stage and stared at the blue curtains hanging down. The blue reminded her of something she was trying not to think about right now, so she turned to her friends. Claude and Caleb were seated next to each other, forgoing their usual rough-housing to huddle together for warmth. Monty was bundled in his massive coat and wrapped in a scarf, huddled down in the neck of it like he was a very timid turtle and the downy garment was his shell. Cupcake was the only one who didn't seem bothered by the cold. Whether this was because she actually wasn't bothered, thanks to her very-warm-looking unicorn beanie and pink coat, or because she tended to act more on the tough side, Pippa couldn't tell, but one thing she was sure of was that she was jealous of Cupcake's nonchalance.

Pippa was cold and more than that, she was scared, and she didn't quite know how to handle that.

As for Jamie...

Wait a second, where _was_ Jamie?

"Guys, how long ago was it that Jamie went to the bathroom?" she asked, reaching in her purse and fumbling with gloved hands for her cellphone to check the time.

"Uuuuh," said Claude, checking his watch. "A while ago."

He looked around, and went on, "I just figured he came back but was wandering around talking to the teachers or some random people. You know how he gets. He's probably trying to get permission to build a giant blanket fort or something."

Now Caleb started looking around, as well. "I don't see him."

"Maybe he's having trouble making a bowel movement," Monty put in helpfully.

"Maybe he drowned in the toilet," Caleb added, picking up on that line of thinking and making it more ridiculous.

"Maybe," said Claude, with a dramatic flair of his hands, "he got eaten by a giant poop monster."

"I'm being serious," protested Pippa. "If he did something stupid like try to go outside for some reason..."

Cupcake looked thoughtful. "Bet it'd be a _good _reason. Or at least an interesting one."

Pippa almost didn't take up that line of thought, but she felt compelled to ask, "Interesting, how?"

Cupcake shrugged, but she looked them all in the eye as if pre-daring them to laugh. "Interesting like how...Jamie's pulled us into interesting things before."

She crossed her arms, reinforcing the dare.

All of them immediately looked everywhere but each other's eyes. This was a non-subject right now. It was weird enough, all of them remembering the night they'd woken up to snow falling in their rooms. For a long time, it'd been a magical thing, a special secret they all shared. The times they'd played in the snow after that, snowballs had hit them from seemingly nowhere, and they'd caught glimpses of a boy in a blue hoodie, always grinning. Those had been magical, too.

Knowing those things, like Santa and elves and The Tooth Fairy maybe were real, if that hadn't been a dream - were _definitely_ real, if they listened to Jamie - had been amazing...

At least they'd been amazing until the storm had hit. People were struggling out there. Some were even _dying_, because the snow and ice and wind just wouldn't stop. That made that grinning face and the snow in their rooms more scary than magical, more unnerving than happy.

It was too much for them to contend with, sorting out the truth from the lies and the one time they'd talked about it, none of them had been in agreement on what it all meant.

Cupcake uncrossed her arms as none of them spoke.

"Maybe something _interesting _is happening, and Jamie's caught up in it right now. Maybe we should even go looking for him," she insisted, glancing at the auditorium door, which was guarded by at least two teachers. No telling how they'd actually get past them, and she frowned at the logistics.

"Or we should just stay here," Pippa said timidly.

"And do what?" Cupcake challenged. "Shiver?" She looked from worried face to face. "Guys. Something amazing happened last year at this time, and now that the world's going nuts again, nobody's talking about it. Why won't you talk about it?"

She seemed bewildered. Genuinely, brashly, bravely bewildered. Why wouldn't their minds jump to the dream they'd all shared of defeating the Boogeyman with figures from stories they'd heard about all their lives, who had turned out to be so much more than the stories had ever said?

She was the only one who hadn't considered the downside to accepting that you shared your world with magical heroes - having to also accept that those heroes existed to protect them from things that made noises in the night. That tried to freeze the world.

It was one thing to be impressed that Santa dual-wielded sabers. It was another to consider that he _had_ to because of what was out there.

All of them shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

"Cupcake, if all that's real, if it wasn't a dream..." Pippa started, but she stopped when she saw the stage curtains move slightly.

Then she heard a quiet, "psst!"

Then a louder, "Psst! Guys!"

They all looked over and saw Jamie briefly peek his head out through the side of the curtains. His eyes were wide and imploring. His head disappeared as quickly as it had peeped out and his hand reached out in its place, beckoning them over.

Cupcake immediately started walking over, and when the others didn't follow her, she glared at them. "What are you waiting for?"

They snuck their way over to the the stairs that led up to the stage, watching for teachers as they crawled up them with their heads down so they weren't seen. One by one, they slipped behind the stage curtain to meet Jamie backstage.

He looked as if he'd been outside, his hair wind-tossed and his cheeks still pink from the cold. For some reason, his boot was off and in his hand and his one sock looked wet.

The other children's expressions ranged between bewildered and afraid, but Cupcake's face lit up.

"You _were_ outside," she said, triumphant. "Why?"

"And why's your boot off?" Caleb asked, eyeing Jamie's wet, frozen feet.

"I threw it at the Bogeyman," Jamie said, as if that happened every day. But that was how it had always been - Jamie talking matter-of-factly about strange and stranger things, barreling on as the kids (minus Cupcake) looked at him with disbelief. "But that's not important right now. Jack needs our help."

They all squirmed uncomfortably.

"Jamie, about that..." Pippa started slowly.

"We're kind of, well..." said Caleb.

"What's going on right now is kind of weird," finished Claude, in a voice that said he didn't like weird just now.

"I think our pretend thing has gone a little out of control," said Pippa, sounding unsure. "So we had some weird dreams, that doesn't mean all of that was real."

"And what if it does," Cupcake cut in. "What if it _was_ real and Jack needs our help to end this crazy weather?"

She paused, and looked at Jamie.

"That _is_ what he needs, right?"

Jamie nodded emphatically. "This crazy guy named Old Man Winter caused all the storms, and he's been tricking people into thinking it's Jack. Now that they're afraid of him, it's giving Old Man Winter too much power, and taking away too much of Jack's."

At that news, Claude and Caleb looked somewhat heartened, but still a little nervous.

"Jamie, say he is real, what if he's just - what if he's just _telling_ you that?" asked Pippa.

"What are you saying?" Jamie asked.

"She's saying that when you think about it all, it's kind of scary," Claude finished for her. "I mean, I'd almost rather not believe at all than believe Jack's real if he might be ..."

"Might be killing people," Caleb said, spitting the thought out.

"What I want to know is how exactly you made the jump from snowball fights to snowing in hospitals," came a voice from the rafters of the stage. It didn't sound angry or upset, more disappointed and sad.

With that, Jack hopped down to land gracefully on the stage floor in front of them. All of them, barring Cupcake, backed away slightly, a gesture that only made the sadness in Jack's eyes more distinct.

Cupcake looked at them with a triumphant smirk. "Can we just assume it all happened now?"

Jack folded himself down into an unthreatening crouch, staff leaning over his shoulder.

"I know that he made this look like I did it. I know it's scary to think that someone you trusted could be doing something bad," he said, "but I really need you to believe me - to - to believe _in_ me. To stop this, I need your help."

They all stood there, their expressions still unsure.

"Guys, please," Jamie said, looking at them all, entreating. "Old Man Winter is trying to freeze the world. The Guardians are fighting him, but without Jack, they might not win. And Jack can't fight him without our help - unless we believe in him."

"_I_ believe," said Cupcake, stomping over to Jamie's side. "What is wrong with you guys? You're all scared? Well what do you think - if you just sit here not believing, that there just won't be anything to be afraid of? That snow out there says otherwise."

Pippa had to admit that sticking their heads in the sand wouldn't fix things, but fear had taken root and it was hard to rip it away.

Still seeing hesitance on their faces, Jack said, "Let me show you something."

He made his way to the stage door to the hallway, hopping along the tops of scenery and stage props, he made his way to the stage door. They all followed, Jamie finally putting on his boot as he hopped along on foot.

In the hallway, the wind shrieked against the windows as if the cold was a living creature trying to claw its way in. Snow piled up, threatening to bury the whole school.

"See that? I'm in here." Jack leaned his staff against the wall and held up his hands, wiggling his fingers. They all knew he needed it to use his powers by now.

The storm raged on outside despite it.

"I'm in here and the storms are still going on out there."

"Don't you guys see?" Jamie said. "It's all up to us." He looked at Pippa, Caleb, Claude, and Monty, who were glancing at Jack's staff and to the winter storms still raging outside. "If we don't believe in Jack...there won't be anything left to believe in."

Even Cupcake was silent for a moment as Jamie's words sunk in.

Finally, Pippa looked from the window to Jack. "But what can _we_ do?"

Jack smiled a gentle smile. "Trust me, it'll be a lot easier this time than last time. I just need you to do two things." He picked up his staff again and pointed at them with it. "One, I need you to hit your school library. And two, I need you to talk to a few people for me..."

* * *

It took some planning and coordination on their parts, but they were used to getting into trouble. Even before they'd met Jack that fateful night after Easter, Jamie had always led them around on what could only be termed "shenanigans," like that time he convinced them to try to catch gremlins that he thought were living in the vents of the school.

Sneaking into the library was easy enough and before long, they were sneaking back in through the backstage door with arms full of children's books.

"Jamie, I've gotta go. I'm leaving the rest to you guys."

Jamie dropped the books immediately and launched himself at Jack, wrapping his arms around his waist.

"Come back soon," Jamie said. It was something any kid would say on seeing their best friend go, but this time, there was so much more weight to it. "As soon as you can."

Jack gave him his most reassuring smile. "Hey, of course. We're still on for tandoori in India. And sushi in Japan."

He gave Jamie one last squeeze and let go, turning to Jamie's friends.

"Thanks, guys. I promise I won't let you down."

With that, he flew off, out through the stage door again.

"Okay, let's move," said Jamie, after one last wistful look at the door, quickly taking command. "Operation: Antifreeze is _go_."

* * *

They moved quickly, spreading the word in whispers. After Jamie and his friends had told the school about their exploits fighting Pitch, naturally their classmates had been among Jack's first believers. Now they just had to rekindle the fire that the cold had put out.

"- Jack Frost needs help -."

" - We have to help Jack -"

" - the snow's not his fault, there's a bad guy causing it -"

"- Old Man Winter made us think Jack was -"

The books they passed around helped even more, the ones some of the older students read to the younger students.

"Now Jack climbed up and up and up, till he began to be quite tired, and at last he got up so high that he could look down into his mother's chimney..."

"- Jack be nimble, Jack be quick -"

"But how can he be the same one in _all_ the stories?"

"The same way Santa can visit everyone's house in one night," was Jamie's answer, as he read his book to a group of kindergartners. That seemed to appease the girl's sense of curiosity.

Before long, phones were out and texts were being sent, kids were calling other kids, and after Monty faked an asthma attack to distract the teachers so they could sneak into the computer labs, kids were logging on to send messages across the world - to cousins and pen-pals, to family that lived across oceans. Kids cowering in parts of the world that were trapped in the cold of night woke up to buzzing phones telling them to spread the word.

"I'm totally posting this on my tumblr for a signal boost," said a fifth grader who'd snuck into the computer lab.

"Your parents let you post on tumblr? Don't you have to be thirteen for that?"

"They never pay attention to what I do on the computer."

The word was out and the message was clear: Jack was innocent and they had to believe. Most importantly of all, he and Santa and the others needed their help.

* * *

"Switch off!"

The nurse quickly handed over the bag valve mask to her coworker, shaking out her cramped hand as she did it.

"Linda, go ask the unit secretary if there's word on when we can get that generator going again!" a doctor called out to her.

She quickly ran out to the desk, where the secretary was just running back.

"They're still in the Boiler Room trying to fix it. They still don't know why it's not working."

It was every hospital's worst nightmare. The ice on the power lines had cut the electricity, and for reasons unknown, the backup generator hadn't kicked in. Normally, in a situation like this, the hospital staff would evacuate, but with four feet of snow on the roads and winds gusting at gale speeds, the chance of getting ambulances or a helicopter in to the hospital's landing pad were slim to none.

The result was chaos. There were no plans for this in the hospital's policies. In any dangerous situation, the goal was always to provide care until normal power was back on and to evacuate the patients and staff to surrounding hospitals if that didn't seem like a possibility.

Evacuation wasn't a possibility now. Linda Bennett bit her lip as she surveyed the chaotic ICU floor. Most of the staff were scrambling to keep their patients alive, resorting to mechanical hand pumps for respiration and hoping the battery power on the IV pumps held out. A harried pharmacy technician, her glasses askew, nearly ran into Linda, her arms full of IVs as she bustled through the busy hallway, handing them off to the outstretched hands of nurses and medical techs.

"Norepi-drip for Weismuller. Sodium bicarb for Macy. I have a K-Rider and a K-phos for Kove - where are they?"

"Expired," said a nurse. It was the professional term, the clinical one, the one written on the charts. It was also what they needed to say right now.

"Balls." The tech's face fell in temporary sadness, but she moved on, "Epinephrine for Murphy."

"Headed for the OR."

"The hell can they do in the OR?" asked another nurse.

"Anything they can," said Linda wearily.

"Right," said the tech and she was off like a shot, trotting along like she was holding herself back from a sprint.

Nurses suddenly surged past Linda. "Code Blue in five! Code Blue in five!"

Linda booked it for the nearest crash cart, wheeling it along to the room, breaking the locks and pulling out the trays of emergency medication as one of the doctors ran in and took over.

The patient in room five was a thirty-year-old mother of two, one who had been perfectly healthy before she'd come down with a case of bronchitis that had turned into pneumonia. Her prognosis hadn't been the best, but the antibiotics had seemed to finally start taking, and they thought they might get to see her sent home to her kids. That was the only thing she'd asked about, her entire time in the ICU, scrawling questions on a dry-erase board that had to be answered over and over because she was so out of it.

It hit close to home. Linda knew Jamie and Sophie were at school and daycare respectively, but every instinct she had almost had her running out there in the snow to get to them, as crazy as that was. All her patient wanted to do was go home and see her kids, too...

"Get that mag bolus going!"

Linda moved quickly, years of practice guiding her movements. At this point, though, to save this patient - and so many others - it would take a miracle -

The lights suddenly all turned back on. Monitors beeped, and ventilators started rattling away. The lights flickered once, briefly, but then the power stayed on. Cheers erupted through the ICU floor and echoed down the hallways from other areas of the hospital.

Down in the basement, bewildered hospital maintenance workers stood outside the door of the boiler room, trying to get in through the mysteriously locked door. As the power flickered on, in spite of the fact that none of them were in the room working on it, they looked at the lights in pure befuddled awe.

"The hell..." one of them muttered. He noticed a strange sound coming through the door, and pressed his ear against it. He listened to the strange whirring and squeaking sounds coming from inside in bewilderment.

If he'd been able to open the door, he would have seen their source. Complicated devices, with wires running from them to the main power sources of the hospital, had been set up, in an arrangement not at all traditional to human engineering.

This was because none of the engineers at work in the boiler room just then were human.

"Rowa rawuga," barked one of the yetis.

"Murga burga wrga blegha."

The yetis tweaked their work as the elves ran frantically on their hamster wheels, their tiny faces screwed up in the utmost determination, generating the power needed to keep the hospital alive.

Lives were on the line and that meant, just like they did every winter, they had to do their best to turn on the lights and banish the dark.

* * *

Snow hadn't fallen along the equator yet, but the temperature was inching towards cold enough for it, and the falling rain was flooding many out of home - and help. People the world over unprepared for a freeze huddled in their homes. Those who had fuel to burn did, crouched around the embers, and those who had blankets huddled under them, though the blankets they had weren't thick enough to keep out the wild wind blowing cold air and cold rain into their homes.

When more blankets fell on their roofs as if blown there by the wind, still covered in their plastic wrappings and the logos of various aid organizations, most were too cold to question it in the moment.

Very few children heard the fluttering of millions of tiny wings, and fewer still caught a sight of jewel-bright flashes zipping in and out of view when the blankets fell through windows and onto doorsteps, but something about the unseasonal hummingbirds warmed their spirits even as the blankets warmed their bodies.

In Brooklyn, two boys pressed their faces to a window, staring across an expanse of snowed-over skyscrapers as ominous groans from the iced-over Brooklyn Bridge rattled their windows.

A suspender cable snapped, rattling the ice, and the boys sucked in a simultaneous breath as the cable lashed out. A dark shape suddenly fell onto the bridge and scuttled from cable to cable. The eight-legged figure threw out a line of web and swung from the end of the lashing cable, swinging it back into place, where it stuck firmly. A moment of scuttling later, the whole iced bridge was covered with a cloud of filmy web, and the boys craned their necks to look as the giant spider-shape scuttled into the buildings below, in their direction, but out of sight.

They stood with breaths held as they stared at the direction the shape had gone - then jumped away from the windows with a screech of instinctive terror as a huge, hairy spider leg crossed their window.

The man attached to the spider legs paused at their window, beamed his gleaming grin at them, and winked over the edge of his sunglasses before scuttling on his way back up the tall building.

The boys hyperventilated in silence a moment. Then one turned to the other.

"I _told _you Spider-man could be black!"

The other boy shook his head. "That wasn't Spider-man! Spider-man doesn't have spider legs!"

"Maybe he mutated! You don't know!"

The argument continued, distracting the children from the cold.

Elsewhere in the world sand gusted along as if carried on a high wind from a desert, sweeping heavy snow from roofs that weren't built to support it, and blasting the ice and snow from blocked roads that lead to important places - fire stations, hospitals, shelters - with miraculous convenience. Refugees against the floods by the equator huddled on high sandy hills as the cold floods flowed by.

But in the far north, people still huddled in their homes. From Alaska to Scandinavia, people who would normally have been active, experienced in braving snowstorms for necessary food and fuel, huddled in disbelieving fear as things barely visible, barely believable in the whiteout prowled outside. Just a glimpse of icicle fangs and black holes for eyes kept the bravest homebound, and parents who had told their children cautionary stories about things mundane, the wolves and bears that got too bold when food was too scarce and crept into human homes to take human children, who had also told scary stories about the adlet, tuurngaq, grýla - suddenly found themselves denying these things, to console their children, but with dark pits in their stomachs as they began to doubt that their own stories had not come from a grain of horrible, vicious truth.

It was worse for those who waited for family members to come back in from the snow.

It was worst when the parents could no longer deny that things were trying to break in - when the noises outside couldn't be blamed on the wind, or snow settling, when burning red eyes peered through windows, and icicle claws scraped at the doors.

Many had myths and names for the man in the red coat who appeared in flashes, turning the growls into brief yelps of pain, then silence - they just didn't know to apply those names, in the moment. Except for the few who caught a glimpse of him traveling by chimney to homes already broken into, somehow still a jolly sight despite the frost-mired, battle-worn sabers in his hands.

And then there were the usual signs that spring would not sleep forever. The crocuses peeping up through the snow. The icicles dripping by the windowsills.

The Guardians held the world together as hope built from a tiny spark to real signs, astonishing people as spring broke through the cold.

* * *

But no amount of hope could change the fact that last year, Easter hadn't happened. And all the hope presently stretching from one corner of the Earth to the other still hadn't made it look any more like this year, Easter would happen.

Bunnymund and Old Man Winter fought on, surrounded by shattered ice and broken stone, the battle long since wound down to only them. Old Man Winter no longer fought like a madman. His howls of rage had quieted, replaced by a determined grin. It stuck, despite the black-blooded battle wounds oozing through his frozen clothes - because there was only almost as much of his blood on the ice as there was Bunny's.

"I have to tell you," said Old Man Winter, deflecting a boomerang with his spear, "honestly, nemesis-to-nemesis - for a minute there, you had me rattled. Well played, Bunnymund." He snickered again, as if Bunny's title were a particularly funny punchline.

Bunny flipped over the old man's head, out of reach of the spear, retrieving and flinging the boomerang in a smooth motion. Old Man Winter's spear throw fell short as he dodged, scraping a nick on Bunny's shoulder instead of running through his heart.

"Oh, the silent treatment, huh?" Jokul Frosti taunted, as blood from the cut poured into Bunny's fur. "Is that any way to treat your elder? Not that you'd know much about treating your elders, since all yours have been dead for so long -"

Bunny launched his other boomerang with a yell, so that it spun around behind Old Man Winter aimed for the back of his head. Bunny charged him, delivering a kick that missed, but catching his boomerang as it missed, too. It put him in the position to deflect Jokul Frosti's spear, shattering it with the boomerang and deflecting the jagged remains of the handle, while thrusting his other paw forward to break the stump of the old man's nose.

But Old Man Winter laughed as he stumbled back, the ice spear reforming in his hands, disturbing, gleeful laughter. "Really, my boy, I think you could benefit from some advice."

"Is the advice 'give it up and go to sleep now?'" asked Bunny. "Because I was about to say the same to you."

"Look, here's what I'm getting at. For a minute there, you got me all caught up in your hopey changey bullpucky but I've got one very important question for you - if you defeated me with your precious powerful _hope_ then what am I still doing here, all awake and undefeated_?"_

"Like you said," Bunny growled, swiping blood from his nose. "It's time to finish the job. You'll never sleep again."

"No," agreed Jokul, in a soft voice. "No I won't."

They met in another clash of wood on ice.

"I mean, the fact of the matter is -" Old Man Winter thrust with his spear, pushing Bunny backwards as he dodged every blow. "Putting someone to sleep is not the same as defeating them. You never _won._ You just delayed losing. Look at you. You're losing now."

Bunny shifted forward suddenly under one of the spear-thrusts and pushed the old man's balance out from underneath him, pulling the spear from his grip and tossing it away.

"So are you."

Old Man Winter rolled out of range as Bunny brought a boomerang down hard in the ice where his head had been. "Not as fast as you." The old man's smile was as cold as the jagged mountains around his fortress as an ice shelf lifted him to his feet. He stood, panting, but battle ready, without a spear in hand. "And you know why now, don't you? Because you got _lucky_ last time. Lucky I didn't finish the job. So there was enough hope left to delay me. So what? _Delaying_ is all hope can do. But all the hope in the world can't stop death."

Bunny lifted his boomerang to throw it, but paused. His flanks heaved with his breathing, and his arm dropped, exhausted from the fight.

"You know it," said Old Man Winter, his breath short - but coming back quickly. "You know who else knows it? _Everyone_ does. Everyone - except children." He spat a clod of black blood, and laughed, high like the wind whistling through icicles. "Those little sods are so _good_ at hanging on. But they all learn, eventually -" the old man looked distant, for a moment, before his attention snapped back to Bunny. "Face it, rabbit. No matter how much hope you bring the little ones, eventually the real world beats it out of them. Eventually they realize that nothing endures like despair – that the only thing certain in this world is death." He paused, added, "and taxes. Both of all learn_. _Every child they die before growing up. And in that final moment - Bunnymund, I'll tell you, whether or not they ever believed in you - they _all_ believe in me."

He yanked his hand back with a sudden jerk. Bunny's eyes widened as he jumped aside, in time to avoid being speared through with the ice shard building behind him, but not quick enough to avoid it opening a gash in his thigh.

Bunny yelled in pain as more blood matted his fur, freezing on the fortress floor. He pressed his paw to the wound to stifle it as Old Man Winter walked forward, swinging his arms, pulling a spear out of the air and inspecting the tip as if at his leisure.

He raised his spear as if to strike, and when Bunny flinched, said, "No." His grin was eager. "Get up, rabbit. I could do this all day."a

Bunny did get up.

Old Man Winter dodged the boomerang that he threw, once, then twice as it whirled around again, moving now in rhythm with his enemy's weapon.

"I almost find it a shame to kill you," Old Man Winter said, his grim amusement gone as he fell into something like musing. "I can't imagine how it wouldn't be a _relief _not to have to live your stupid life."

"You don't know anything," Bunny growled, but his breath was coming too fast - and his blows were coming too slow.

"No? I don't know how pathetic it is, to do what you do, and live as you are? Bunnymund, I'm no poet, but there's poetry in your pathetic life." Old Man Winter grinned. "You make your whole existence revolve around_ them_, around one little day of pleasant frivolity, but the children always disregard you in the end. They grow up and realize that no amount of Easters will ever defeat death, and they call you a cute little lie and pass you onto someone smaller and stupider, someone who won't stay stupid for too much longer."

With a sudden sweep of his spear, he caught Bunny on the side of the head, the crack of the blow resounding off the ice walls.

Bunny fell to the ice with a thud, pushing himself slowly, unsteadily up, bleeding from his left ear. He looked up at the point of an ice spear, aimed squarely at his throat.

Past the glittering spearhead, Old Man Winter's grey eyes flashed with malice - and triumph.

"I am the cold death," he said, softly. "I can sleep for a thousand years, spend eternity wiping out every last shred of life on this planet, while you waste your whole miserable life living for them – but though all children lose their belief in you, no adult will _ever_ lose their fear of me. Only when I snuff out every life on this planet, will I be as _alone_ as you are."

Bunny said nothing - and in the silence, his expression said the words had pierced his heart, more effectively than any spear.

Old Man Winter's smile widened - just as Jack slipped through the window on a breeze behind him.

"Where's your spark of hope now, rabbit?"

Bunny caught Jack's eye, and his desperation gave way to a sudden grin.

"Right behind you."

Old Man Winter looked over his shoulder for a split second - just long enough for a snowball to hit him in the face.

Bunny jetted to Jack's side as Old Man Winter spluttered, pawing at the snow on his face with pure indignation. "WHO DARES THROW SNOWBALLS AT -" as Old Man Winter caught sight of Jack (and Bunny, crouched by his side), his face twisted into outright disbelief. "_Are you kidding me?"_

Bunny crouched beside Jack, putting pressure on his leg wound as it healed. "Thanks for coming," he said softly.

Jack just grinned back at the rabbit. "Of course I showed up. This is where the fun is."

Old Man Winter's face twisted at the sight of Jack, not just alive, but unfrosted. "Don't tell me." he glared at Bunny. "A diversion? What gives, rabbit, not ready to die for vengeance after all? And here I thought we had the makings of a real special nemesis-" Old Man Winter paused. "Nemesi-sisitude. Is that a word?"

"Funny thing about vengeance," Bunny said, casually (and literally) licking his wounds. "It doesn't go well with hope. Besides, I'm not the only Guardian who's got a bone to pick with you."

"Yeah," agreed Jack. "We're team players here. Good teammates don't hog _all_ the fun."

"So what's your game," Old Man Winter snarled, "Another fight to the death? Because your furry friend there already tried it."

"Fight to the death?" Jack snorted, walking forward, swinging his staff like someone out for a pleasant walk. "That's not really the point of winter, is it? I mean, this whole competition - spring versus winter, the new winter spirit versus the very, very old and pruny one - here you are, bashing your way through all this stuff with brute force but you're missing the point we should be focusing on."

"Aaaugh!" Old Man Winter threw his shriveled hands up in the air. "Enough with the riddles! You guys and your sense of misdirection! Just hurry up and decide who I'm killing today so we can get on with it!"

"Killing either of us won't prove that _your_ winter is the strongest winter. You might be stronger than all the Guardians put together, but strength isn't the only force behind winter - winter also endures. It drags on through the months and clings on when it shouldn't. In the summers, icebergs still float out there in the ocean, taking forever to melt; the seas are still cold, and there are those cold snaps that ruin Easter egg hunts. I'm not even going to argue that winter should be fun or that winter should give way to spring. But when it comes to endurance, I leave you in the dust, and I bet you're not even clever enough to prove me wrong."

The lilting tone in Jack's voice, part mocking, part gently cajoling was extremely familiar to Bunny. He'd heard Anansi use that same tone when fooling a stronger enemy (or potential mark) time and time again. It seemed Jack had picked up more than Bunny had noticed from their previous mission in Africa.

Old Man Winter's frown grew progressively more indignant as Jack's tactic worked. "Is that a challenge, boy?" he waved his hands. "The new kid really thinks he's got the chops to outlast the guy who was around for _centuries _before? You want to talk endurance, kid? I am _ancient._"

"And I beat Pitch with a snowball to the face and a handful of believers," said Jack. It was technically true, since Jack's little bout of snowy fun had helped keep Jamie from giving into fear. "You hit me with the Snow Queen's shards and they didn't take, obviously. I went _three hundred years _without believers, without losing a spark of power. Meanwhile _yo_u needed to get tucked in for a nappy-wappy when everyone got comfortable thinking spring was right around the corner. I don't wimp out - that's all you. You might be stronger, but I'm the winter that endures - and to prove it, I'm willing to make a little wager here and sweeten the pot with something you want."

Jack cocked his head, before Jokul could protest, and added, "With the Enkidu oath backing it up." He held out his arms, as if surrendering himself. "If you win this, you get my heart. It's the only way you'll get it now."

Old Man Winter growled, the blood in his wounds literally bubbling at Jack's accusations. "You're on, Frost! Make it official and we'll see who needs a nap after this! You, me, and _no _more interference!"

He shot a glare at Bunny, who laughed. "Ah look, mate, he _knows_ he couldn't take us together. You feel sorry for the blowhard yet?"

Jack tilted his head. "Maybe a little."

Bunny scoffed. "That makes one of us."

Old Man Winter narrowed his icy glare at Bunny. "Don't get smug too fast. After I demolish the Frost kid, I'm finishing what I started a thousand years ago. You're living on borrowed time."

"You beat him, and you won't have even a second to gloat about it," Bunny growled, reaching for his boomerang.

"Can we put a lid on the raging nemessisitude for about five minutes?" Jack cut in. "Before you two get started again, we have that whole 'Who's the King of Winter?' deal to figure out."

"Wow, you're really eager to bite it, aren't you kid?" Old Man Winter sneered. "Fine. A competition. If it's not a fight, what exactly did you have in mind?"

"Winter is about overcoming the world, right?" said Jack. "That means it involves overcoming the water, overcoming the earth, and overcoming fire itself. These are the conditions of the oath: Three challenges, best two out of three. If I win, you can never hurt anyone again - you can't even _try_ to - except in self-defense, I guess. You win, you get my heart."

"And if we tie?" said the Old Man.

Jack grinned. "You're _that_ worried about losing?"

"It's three challenges or nothing, kid. If we tie, tie goes to me. I'm not dragging this nonsense out to best twelve out of twenty-three."

"Fine." Jack raised his hands. "Tie goes to you."

He caught Bunny looking at him, an edge of worry around his features.

"Jack," he said, softly. "You sure?"

There was a part of Jack that wasn't sure. But he shrugged.

"I don't want to drag this out either," he said.

Bunny didn't say anything else. He just stood up, grooming the last of the blood from the fur around his ear, looking at Jack with the same thoughtful - and concerned - expression.

"Excellent." Old Man Winter bared his broken teeth in a ragged grin. "I agree to the terms. Challenged picks the challenges. Son, are you familiar with 'Hell's Gate?'"

* * *

Old Man Winter's first challenge lead them to New Zealand, where a steaming hot spring boiled -_ literally_ - out of the ground. Old Man Winter grinned at Jack. "The first challenge - triumph over water. Think you're cold enough to freeze _Hell's Gate, _kid?"

"It was called Tikitere first," Bunny cut in, having followed them to the site of the challenge.

Old Man Winter turned his glare on Bunny. "No one asked you."

Bunny glanced at Jack with a strange expression. Jack recognized it as a warning glance.

What was he warning him about? It was a just a little hot spring, right? Shouldn't be a problem at all.

Except, it could be a problem, couldn't it? Jack had slowly been learning to think about the consequences of his actions, and he thought of them now.

There had to be life here that could only grow in the heat and if it was cold for too long, that could kill it. Not to mention, blocking geothermal vents didn't really seem like the kind of thing that went without consequences to something or someone.

Yemaja had been right about the cycles of the world. Winter had to concede to spring, and it shouldn't go where it wasn't supposed to. That was the reason the world needed his winter instead of Jokul's, because he cared at all that there were consequences.

"No," Jack said. "Look, I'm up for this challenge, but we don't have to do it here."

Bunny nodded, an approving smile settling on his face as Old Man Winter's glare hardened. "Challenger doesn't pick the challenges, son. That's not how this works. I pick here, and I pick now. If you're not up for the challenge, _I am."_

He lifted his frostbitten hand, ice magic dancing in jolts at the tips of his fingers. The warm, steamy air around them cooled, the steam falling to the ground in the sudden chill.

"Of course, go ahead, freeze a hot spring on Aotearoa, of all places," Bunny snarked from the background again. "Rūaumoko's going to be thrilled. You really think you're in a position to make _more_ enemies?"

"Rua-whoever can get in line for the same kind of beating I gave you," Old Man Winter spat. "You _lost_, rabbit - what are you even still doing here?"

"This is why you're going to lose. Even if you win this one, even if you get my heart in the end." It was reassuring, finally realizing that, finally having it hammer home. "This isn't the winter the world needs."

"Uh, that's the _point?"_ Old Man Winter spat. "Anyway, you're wrong, kid. This _is_ the winter the world needs - the winter the world needs _to die_! Haha! See what I did? See what I did there?"

He looked back and forth between Jack and Bunny's unamused faces, his laughter subsiding. "So say it, kid. You forfeit this match? Then _say it."_

Jack squeezed his eyes shut. He'd locked himself out of tying, and here he was, about to concede the first match.

This wasn't about him anymore, though. This had never been about him. This was about being a Guardian. It was about being what the world needed - even if it meant dying. He had to hope that if that happened, the choices he made here somehow nipped Jokul in the butt anyway.

Gripping his staff tightly, he said, "I forfeit."

Old Man Winter stared at him with quiet disapproval. "That's dumb."

He held out his hand and froze the spring solid.

Instantly, the ground rumbled with built-up pressure. Bunny jumped up, looking panicked.

"He forfeited the match, you gallah! There was no call for that!"

"We've got to unfreeze it," Jack said, as the solid ice refused to budge to the pressure of the flowing spring. "Something's going to get hurt. That wasn't part of the competition!"

"Newsflash kid," said Old Man Winter, with a dark chuckle - "Winter doesn't do the unfreezing."

Jack's eyes went wide, disgust filling his gut at Jokul saying the same words he'd said to Bunny.

"Okay! Next competition! Triumph over Earth. A race to the top of Annapurna I, no flying once you reach the base of the mountain, no gear! Ready and GO!"

A sharp, cold southern wind whipped Jokul Frosti into the air and on his way back to the Himalayas, laughing like a hyena.

Bunny was looking over the frozen spring, tapping the ground as if to sound it out. Jack hesitated, feeling the earth trembling beneath him and looking at the ice, still too cold to give.

"Go," said, Bunny. "I'll take care of this. You have to beat him."

"No," Jack said, tapping his staff on the ice at the edge. "This isn't just about me and it isn't just about this contest. If he gets my heart in the end, it'll be a heart that _chokes _him. I'm fixing this."

"You're a good kid, Jack," Bunny said, sounding half exasperated, half proud. "I wish I'd known how good sooner." Jack smiled at that, savoring the feeling of warmth in his heart that he'd been so sure he would die without feeling again. "But that's why you've got to go. The world _needs _you to win. You both said it - winter doesn't do the unfreezing. That's spring's job."

But Jack felt something else, a knowledge that might have been growing since he found himself freezing over - since he'd worked so hard to try and unfreeze himself.

"I think we were both wrong," he said, touching his staff to the edge of the ice.

He felt the edges of the ice, where it held, intensely cold, against the heat of the subterranean springs. The earth groaned beneath them as if it was in pain from the backing up of the spring. Bunny held his foot above the ground, eyes closed in concentration, and brought it down with a thud. The earth ceased to groan as the hot water funneled away from the blocked spring, but even so, the ice remained where it should not. Heat from the vents was beginning to melt it, but slowly.

"Iced-over roads, and people slipping, and holding back the plants from growing when they needed to..." Jack said slowly and as he said it, cracks started to stretch out over the ice from the place where his staff was touching it. "Everything I did for attention, it was all because I didn't realize there was something I was supposed to do. Something I was supposed to _be_."

He was a Guardian. Winter was meant to give way to spring. He'd always tried to make himself belong in places he didn't actually belong, but he couldn't afford to be that selfish anymore. The fact that he recognized that was one of the things that _made _him a Guardian.

Casting off the desire to be seen and noticed, no matter the cost, felt like fighting his way out of his own skin, leaving it behind so he had room to grow.

A single loud snap sounded through the air like a whipcrack and then the ice splintered and melted away. Around the springs, the ice and snow that had blasted over the plants melted away, too, so that the green could breathe again, no longer choked off by the white that didn't belong there.

"It looks better this way," said Jack, taking to the air with a smile.

Bunny smiled after him, and it was the same proud smile Jack had thought he would never see again.

He stamped the release holes to the spring shut again. "Get out of here, slowpoke. I'll be right in front of you."

Jack grinned. A race to Annapurna? "Is that a challenge, Cottontail?"

* * *

The Annapurna mountain range shouldered up against the green Pokhara Valley, peak after peak piercing the clouds to shine beneath a sky so blue it almost hurt to look at. Annapurna I, the tallest of the range, the mountain that had killed more climbers per attempt, threw a shadow upon itself. The south face of the mountain was barely more than a sheer cliff. Old Man Winter was already laboring up it when Jack landed at the base.

Bunny was already waiting as Jack landed. "He's got a hundred-meter lead on you, go go go!"

Jack tossed his staff to the rabbit. "Keep an eye on that for me, will you? No tools allowed."

Bunny caught the staff, stamping a tunnel open. "See you at the peak."

Jack looked up at the mountain rising up before him as Bunny dropped into the tunnel.

"Just like a beanstalk," Jack muttered to himself.

But he didn't need any extra juice from the kids for this. With a challenge like this, being young and spritely came in handy, and for a boy who cruised around Antarctica when he needed some time to himself, the cold of the mountain was home.

With every ridge he climbed over, every ledge he crept across, new sights rose up before him, transcendently beautiful. The race became less about beating the old man and more about getting quickly to each new icy landscape and resplendent view of the valleys below. After going so long without seeing anything beautiful, Jack was hungry for each new sight. If he was going to crash and burn at the end of this, then he was at least going to enjoy the ride.

As Jack raced up the mountain, light footsteps and little jumps and tiptoed balancing acts bringing him closer and closer to the top, his laughter echoed down into the empty valleys below. Missteps set off avalanches down below him, but he moved on, taking his usual joy from each narrow escape.

Immune to the cold, his endurance far beyond that of a mortal human, with no need to eat or drink or sleep, a climb that took many climbers days upon days took Jack just a few hours.

He'd lost track of Old Man Winter in the climb, so when the summit loomed close in his sight, he put on a burst of speed, clambering to the top like a spider monkey.

The only person there was Bunny, breathing deeply in the thin air, Jack's staff stuck in a snow bank beside him.

Jack heaved a few breaths from the exertion of his climb. "Old Man Winter?" he asked.

Bunny's grin was enormous. "Not a sign of him."

He and Jack leaped up with a cheer at the same time, their shouts of victory setting off avalanches on the mountain below and soaring into the bright blue sky. They were still laughing by the time Old Man Winter dragged himself onto the summit, lying face-down in the powder, heaving loudly like a fish out of water (or an old man exerting himself too hard).

It took him a moment to look up, and his face snapped into the most indignant of frowns as he caught sight of Bunny and Jack, waving with snide grins.

Old Man Winter howled with rage, kicked, and screamed, and did it all still lying face-down in the snow. Jack and Bunny howled with laughter. Old Man Winter stood and stamped to his feet to the sound of it.

"Get your laughs out now, you little snots!" he growled. "There's still one trial left and believe you me, this one's a doozy. The next trial is _by fire_and nobody laughs in front of the Earth-Eating Woman."

Bunny stopped laughing. "You still want to have a trial by fire? After that stunt you pulled with Tikitere?" he paused, disbelieving, but Old Man Winter only grinned. "In front of _Pele_?"

"I dunno." Old Man Winter shrugged. "Maybe. We'll see if the old girl is kicking up an impressive fuss today.

Bunny rolled his eyes and scoffed. "Your funeral."

"Nooo," sang Old Man Winter, "I believe _you're_ the one who holds funerals when I'm involved."

Jack practically heard Bunny's temper snap. He grabbed Bunny and held him in place just as he leaped at Old Man Winter.

"You heartless old windbag!" Bunny yelled, his shout echoing through the sky and over the mountains, but he didn't push Jack off. "You're lower than a snake's armpit! Oh, I am going to _love _watching you fade out."

"Let him say what he wants, Bunny," Jack said, thumping him gently on the shoulder to get his attention. "Soon, that's gonna be all he'll able to do. He's not worth the energy."

Old Man Winter's smirk was back, resurrected from his previous win. But Bunny backed away, swinging his arms, pacing as if the mountain was suddenly too small to contain all three of them.

"You're a real risk-taker," Jack said dryly, rolling his eyes back to Old Man Winter. "But hey. Trial by fire time. The guy who _hasn't _already thumbed his nose at a lava spirit is ready."

"To Hawai'i, then," said Old Man Winter. "And your _doom."_

"And did I mention your dramatics are slipping?" Jack put in. "I mean. You could at least leave off the cliches. What's next? Ice puns?"

"Oh, just hurry up and fly so I can watch you die already," Old Man Winter groaned, as a gust of wind whipped him away, and Jack leapt off the mountain in pursuit.

* * *

The volcanic Kīlauea was, indeed, active. More than active enough for the final challenge to actually be challenging. Jack couldn't see any lava through the thick plume of smoke that billowed into the night sky from the Halemaʻumaʻu crater, a mile-wide hole at the summit of the low, wide mountain, but the glow of it filled the smoke with hot orange light.

"Woo!" hooted Old Man Winter, peering over the edge of the volcano. "The hot mama's cookin' up a storm tonight!"

"Wow, that wasn't nearly as rude as it could have been," Jack snarked. "So is Pele the only person you're afraid of enough not to insult without abandon, or are there others I should know about?"

"Kid, will you get to work dying in that fire? You're taking up my time and I've got a long eternity of freezing the world to get to."

Old Man Winter pointed across the glowing hole in the mountain.

"Now this is a very simple challenge - a leap over the fire. Winner reaches the other side without a scratch. Loser who has to fly out, uh - loses! Loser who falls in _probably dies_! I don't know! Can a good lava bath kill a _real_ winter spirit? Well we sure won't find out tonight, because the _real_winter spirit's going to make it to the other side unscathed! Hahaha!"

While Old Man Winter chortled, Jack rolled his eyes and glanced at Bunny, who hadn't beaten them to the summit this time. He'd stopped off to pick something up, and was now crouched over them - branches covered with red and yellow berries - muttering something prayer-like. He stood up and dropped the branches into the crater, then shot a glare at Old Man Winter.

"You're a bloody drongo, you are. Holding a challenge with Kīlauea as your obstacle, and you didn't even bring Pele an offering? What, do you think you're going to freeze the planet's core one day, too? You couldn't take spring out and you're practically spitting in every lava spirit's face that you can manage. At this rate you'll make enough enemies that _someone_ will off you, even if it isn't us."

"I'm sorry, who's got the whole world in his hands, and who's a sad loner who's going to die alone? You're an idiot for thinking any of your dumb little rules matter anymore." But Old Man Winter glanced into the crater for a split second as if watching for a signal that the rules, according to Pele, still mattered.

Bunny broke two of the branches remaining from his offering and hid them in his paw.

"Short stick jumps first."

He held them out to Jack and the old man, his glare steadily fixed on Old Man Winter. The old man took his time in picking a stick, clearly relishing invading the personal space of someone who had every reason to still want to punch him in the face. With a sigh, Jack took his stick quickly, leaving the old man with only one choice - the short stick. He shrugged and took it from Bunny's paw.

"About how often would you say you cried yourself to sleep over the ages?" he asked, conversationally. Jack put his hand on Bunny's arm as he growled, his paws clenched into fists.

Old Man Winter walked away, chuckling, to the edge of the crater. Bunny was still breathing heavily, but he turned away and looked down when Jack squeezed his arm.

"Are you okay?" Jack asked. Bunny's anger dissipated, but with a sigh, he looked away from Jack again. He said nothing, but lifted his paw to ruffle Jack's hair gently.

Jack leaned into the contact, as the thought occurred to him that this might be the last kind touch he ever felt in his life - that crater was wide, and he felt the heat of the volcano even at this distance.

"If I can't make it," he said, suddenly, "I'll fall into the fire. Old Man Winter can't get my heart if it burns up. If you fight him right away, you can probably kill him here before he gets too much of my belief back."

Bunny still didn't say anything, just squeezed his paw gently in Jack's hair, as a big brother might pet their younger sibling. As Jack could remember doing to his sister, all those years ago - as he'd done to Jamie, just a few hours before.

They stood that way as Old Man Winter swung his arms back and forth at the edge of the volcanic crater, psyching himself up for the jump.

"And-a-one, and-a- hey! Are you losers watching this?"

He backed up, up, and took off running. His leap took him high over the volcanic plume - high, but not high enough.

"Ooh, he's out," Bunny said, eagerly, letting go of Jack. "Maybe he'll burn himself up."

Old Man Winter fell, flailing and flapping his limbs madly, and a gust of suddenly cold wind whipped him back into the air and out of the range of the volcano. He landed clumsily on the other side, just as a glow from behind them caught Bunny and Jack's attention.

They turned around just in time to spot Tooth before she zipped up next to them, Sandy close behind, carrying North and Anansi on a glowing cloud.

"How's the plan going? Did you win?" Tooth asked, Baby Tooth chirping anxiously beside her.

"Not yet, but you're just in time to watch it happen," Bunny told her, grinning at Jack. "The old man's one for two - Jack takes this one, and it's all over."

"And if I don't take it, hey, you're all here to take him out in the heat," said Jack, trying for humor and realizing too late that he'd not quite reached it.

"Jack," said Tooth, her expression worried, "that's not funny."

"Was almost funny," North put in. "Good try, Jack. Humor under stress, very important. Gold star."

"You can do it, mate," Bunny insisted, putting his paw on Jack's shoulder again. "One jump and it's all over."

Sandy, smiling, flipped him a double-thumbs-up.

"It's safe to say that everyone here believes in you," said Anansi, looking at Jack over his glasses with bright eyes.

"Except maybe for him," North put in, looking over his shoulder. They all turned as Old Man Winter drew up behind them, winded from his failed jump and walk back over.

"Well well well," he said, eyeing the Guardians with a stare too disappointed for his usual mirthful evil. "The peanut gallery finally decides to show up. Where exactly have you clowns been?"

"Oh, you know," said North. "Around."

"Bringing supplies," said Tooth.

"Repairing bridges," Anansi put in.

Sandy whipped up a few houses of of glittering dreamsand and dusted the 'snow' off their roofs with a likewise-sandy feather duster.

"Fighting snowmen, keeping safe the people's homes -" North shrugged. "You know. Guardian stuff."

Old Man Winter looked from Guardian to Guardian, his mouth falling open in indignation. "You guys were cheating!"

"Oh really," said Bunny, crossing his arms. "You wanna explain how them doing their jobs is cheating?"

"I'm tired," Old Man Winter insisted, "from kicking your cottontail, you long-eared failure. If I was at the top of my game, this little whelp _never _would have beaten me up the mountain -"

"That sound like the whining of a winter spirit who can't endure to anyone else?" asked Bunny catching Jack's eye. "Sounds like it to me." Out of the corner of his eye, Jack spotted Sandy jingling a set of keys over a bundle of sand cradled in two of Anansi's legs as the Spider mock-cooed at it. Jack grinned.

"Uh, the competition was my idea," he said, planting a hand on his hip. "_They_ were just doing their jobs. You know, making the world safe for children? Now I may have stopped off to get some of my believers back, but that was before this competition was ever set. You feeling that drain? I told you, I'm the world the winter needs, not you."

Old Man Winter seethed so hard that the hot, dry air around them chilled a few degrees - more frost crystallized on his skin and the volcano rumbled softly beneath their feet. "We'll see about that, boy. Stop stalling and jump."

Jack took a deep breath, and looked at the crater. His words to Bunny burned in his mind. 'Old Man Winter can't get my heart if it burns up.'

He felt a soft, cool hand touch his, and looked over to Tooth. She offered him a small smile, the glow from the lava lighting up the jewel tones on her feathers.

Behind her, North, Sandy, and Anansi wore similar, encouraging smiles. Bunny clapped a paw on Jack's shoulder, and when Jack turned around, he was smiling too.

"Jack," said North - "Whatever happens - we are proud of you."

"Hello!" Old Man Winter shouted. "Are we having a competition here, or are we just staring lovingly into each other's' eyes? Move it, people! Some of us have a world to destroy!"

"Go show him how it's done," said Bunny, shrugging towards the volcano.

Jack handed his staff to Bunny again, and started his walk to the edge of the crater.

The heat built in the ground beneath him as he walked, hot enough to burn his feet, and he gave the crater a wide berth, circling around it at a distance until the angle of the wind blew the plume of smoke just enough to his left that he could see the other side of the volcano.

"Okay," he said. A mile jump. _A mile jump. "_Jack be nimble, Jack be quick...just think of it as a _really _big candle._"_

He could feel the kids' belief in him, rolling in the pit of his being. His climb up the mountain hadn't depleted him. Whatever Jamie and the other kids were doing, whatever they were thinking, singing, talking about - it was working. It was making him strong.

It was making it so maybe he could do things he never could before. Just like North had to have once discovered he could visit every house in the world in one night or Bunny had discovered he could hide millions of eggs at once. This was his moment now.

Over to the left was a whole team of heroes who believed in him, too. Their belief didn't do what a child's could, but it still meant something. He glanced at the other Guardians, watching him with eager hope.

It was like having his family in the bleachers, waiting to cheer for his first home run - only, with the balance of nature on the line instead of the game any other kid would have to worry about.

He couldn't wait to celebrate winning with them.

Jack took off running at the volcano. His mad dash ate up the ground, building up all the speed he could, and he jumped - high, high over the plume of smoke, elated and terrified at the same time to be flying without wind, Kīlauea's metaphorical candlestick rolling beneath him.

He started to come down - realizing as he did that he was just going to make the edge of the crater. He let out a whoop of triumph, landed - and crashed through the thin lip of the crater, taking the edge with him.

His whoop of triumph turned to a shout of terror, then an "Oof!" of pain as he clapped his hands over the solid (hot) edge, the breath knocked out of him, his hands and hoodie singed by the hot rock. He scrabbled, burning, fighting his instincts to let go, and suddenly caught his foot on a sharp rock, pushing himself up and over the lip of the crater -

He could hear the Guardians shouting in triumph all the way on the other side of the volcano. He barely had time to sit up before a tunnel opened next to him, and then Bunny was yanking him to his feet.

"You made it!" he was laughing.

So was Jack. "I know!"

They hollered with victory, shouting and jumping as the adrenaline wore off. Bunny pulled Jack straight off the ground into a huge hug, and Jack hugged him back, burying his face in Bunny's ruff, elated to feel soft fur and a friend's warm hug instead of the fires of Kīlauea.

Bunny planted him back on the lava, ruffling his hair with both paws.

"Good onya, you little ripper," he said, grinning from ear to ear.

Jack could feel his own grin, so wide it almost hurt. He hadn't smiled this much since he'd become a Guardian himself.

"C'mon, let's get you back over," said Bunny, stamping open a tunnel again. Jack followed him back to the others, where he was instantly bowled over by a three-Guardian hug. Nobody objected when Anansi enveloped them all in his spider-grip again.

Jack didn't recognize the bone-chilling screech as coming from Old Man Winter until the others had let him go, and then they all stared, as the King of Cold Mountain had a screaming tantrum.

"No! NO! I won't do it! I won't take the oath! You all and me, fight to the death, come on, let's go. Right now."

He forged a spear, but it was brittle in the hot, dry air. None of the Guardians took a stance.

"That's...not how it works," said Anansi, almost gently (but only almost).

"You see, agreeing to take the oath is taking the oath," said Tooth. "Jack, how did you put it?"

"A competition, with the Enkidu Oath backing it up," said Jack. "You said you agreed to the terms. If I won, the oath was in place. And I just won. You can't back out of the Oath now, you've already taken it."

Old Man Winter's disbelief was almost pitiful, panic and anger fighting for dominance in his expression.

"You're just afraid," he said, his voice building to a yell. "I still have the power! All the power of winter, at my command! I feel it! You just know you can't win!"

"Except your Oath was not to hurt anyone ever again," said Jack. "You can't even _try_. So of course we won't fight you. You'd be breaking the Oath by starting a fight with us."

"It's over," said Bunny. "Go find some hole to crawl in, Old Man. You're never going to hurt anyone ever again."

"But I have the power," Old Man Winter insisted.

"You can use it," Jack said lightly. "...Just not to hurt anyone."

Old Man Winter looked at him with sheer disbelief. "But that's what power's _for_!"

"Not for you," said Bunny. "Not anymore."

"Then kill me," Old Man Winter hissed, through gritted teeth. The Guardians paused, silent, staring at him. "Give me a warrior's death. I won't fade away like some beggar in a cave. Kill me now."

There was a long pause as the Guardians stared at him.

Finally, Bunny spoke.

"You have hope, old man," he said. "You can find something better to live for." His voice was a combination of disgust, frustration, and - probably worse, to Old Man Winter - pity. "There are people dead who deserved what you have, and they didn't get it because of you. You don't deserve it, but you're not allowed to waste it just because you don't know that it's a gift."

He turned his back on Old Man Winter and stamped a hole in the ground. Before he could go, Old Man Winter snorted, his wretchedness and his disgust thick on his voice.

"They got what they deserved," he spat, and Bunny froze with one foot over the hole. "They lived like cowards, underground, and they died like cowards underground. And now you're giving them exactly the end they deserved - an un-avenged one. But I deserve the glorious death I've given worthier warriors than you, you cotton-tailed coward. I hope the spirits of your stupid little pooka family at least have the decency to roll over in their graves with shame that you didn't have the chops to avenge them."

Bunny held his position with his foot over the open tunnel, inhaled, then closed the tunnel. He whirled around and stomped back to Old Man Winter.

Jack took a step forward to stop him, but a light tug on his back made him look over his shoulder. Anansi had strung a line of web to the back of Jack's hoodie, and he shook his head slightly.

"Noooo," he said, softly. "Let him. This is going to be righteous."

The spider's small smile was almost scarier than his fangy grin.

Bunny crouched down beside the wretched old man.

"You don't know anything," he said, almost conversationally, his voice almost completely free of anger. "Look at you - you're like a rabid creature. For someone with such big goals, you're bloody _small_. It's sad enough I don't think I can even hate you anymore."

In the face of those words, Jack could see Old Man Winter hitting rock bottom - and then even that giving way beneath his feet.

"And you know, I'm relieved," Bunny continued, as implacable as the sunrise. "Hate is a heavy thing to carry around. Too heavy for me and too useless. Hating you never gave me anything. It never gave me back anyone you took from me. It never gave me any kind of clarity. Pretty much the opposite, actually."

He stood up and returned to the Guardians. "Besides, you haven't killed my entire family." When he was level with them, he put his paw on Jack's shoulder. "Just the ones I had back then."

Jack had to look at him again to smile. Tooth, hovering at Bunny's other side, took his free paw, and he looked at her with gratitude. North clapped him on the back, and Bunny only staggered under the affection a little bit.

"Is good," the Cossack said. "Later, we shall celebrate! Shake off old, new day of building future! We-"

"Hey, North, a picture's worth a thousand words," Anansi said, producing a camera from...somewhere, and using his legs to gather the rest of the Guardians into a group huddle. Sandy helpfully provided everyone with dreamsand moose antlers, and Bunny tolerated being the center of the pile until Anansi had snapped the picture. It happened so fast they barely had any time to react at all before he released them and probably resulted in the least flattering candid photo ever.

"So no," said Bunny, turning back to Old Man Winter. "I won't kill you. Instead, I'm going to go and bring Spring again. And if you knew anything about the ones you took from me, you'd know they'd be proud of that. Too proud even to have any room left to hate you."

"You're done," Jack said, about as gently as Old Man Winter deserved - which was to say, not very. "And we're done with you."

"And none too soon," North agreed. "If we can be going now, I have workshop to rebuild. Christmas does not make itself." His expression shifted to something a touch sheepish. "And the elves, sometimes they do not do so well in the wild. They are little and slow, and world is so big. They belong at fireside, not in pine forest."

Jack felt the rest of winter flowing back to him as the Enkidu Oath finished kicking in. The burst of strength refueled his tired limbs, and he stretched, breathing in deep, feeling the chill inside him strengthening him against the heat of the volcano.

"Bunny," he said, as Bunny stamped open another tunnel. The rabbit looked up. "Let me come with you. I can help bring spring this year, now that I've got a new trick up my sleeve."

There was still a lot of snow to melt, after all, and a lot of Old Man Winter's mess to clean up.

Bunny started to smile - but suddenly grabbed his boomerang and threw it, with a shout. "Jack! Look out!"

He grabbed Jack, yanking him behind himself and whipping out his other boomerang as the spear Old Man Winter had thrown fell harmlessly to the side, passing right through where Jack had been. Old Man Winter yelled in anger and pain, gripping his throwing arm were Bunny's boomerang had struck it, knocking the spear off aim, and reached to pull another one out of the air.

"If I can't have winter, no one can!" he screeched, reaching to pull another spear out of the air.

The Guardians whipped out their weapons to defend, but no spear appeared out of the air in Old Man Winter's hands. Instead, he stood weaponless, looking at his hands in horror as water beaded on his frozen skin, pooling in his palms, dripping from his fingers.

Jack sucked in a sharp breath. "He's thawing out."

Old Man Winter looked at his thawing skin, his face twisting with pain as he began to be, again, what he was - a frozen corpse, with no more magic to keep him iced, at the edge of a volcano.

"You attacked another with intent to hurt," Anansi announced. "The Oath is broken." Old Man Winter looked at them, his expression desperate. "Old Man, you have undone yourself."

"No," Jokul Frosti said, softly at first. Then his face twisted with hatred. "No! I'm still the strongest! You won by trickery! That's all love is! A trick to keep people fighting for you when you're too weak to deserve it! You never could have faced me head-on!"

Bunny put his paw on Jack's shoulder, guiding him away. "The old gallah can shout himself to death without us. Let's go."

The Guardians walked away, leaving Old Man Winter shouting behind them. "You won't last, boy, you don't know what you're part of! You'll all freeze one day, all of you! _Nothing will outlast the freeze!_"

Kīlauea shook suddenly beneath them. The Guardians stopped whirling back to look at the crater, and the smoke above it suddenly burning brighter with more roiling magma.

A voice like the hiss of seawater meeting red hot lava roared, "_Dat so, Old Man?"_

More smoke poured from the volcano, and globs of lava erupted with it, raining down around the lip of the crater. Old Man Winter's pallor suddenly went paler.

The Guardians scurried away from the mounting eruption. Old Man Winter tried to follow, but his broken Oath ate away at his vigor. He stumbled on the smooth ground and fell as lava spewed from the crater, shooting high in the air and hanging in a shifting, loose, female shape.

An arm flowed from the lava-woman, and she snatched Old Man Winter up with it. Steam hissed where the lava and Old Man Winter's waterlogged skin met, and he screamed, half in pain, half in terror, as the dripping lava hand brought him close to where a face should have been. A hole opened in the eyeless face, lava dripping from the edges like searing teeth.

A voice issued from the gaping mouth - "_You still looking to catch cracks, haole?_"

"I give! I give!" Old Man Winter shrieked. He half-laughed, half-shrieked his terror. "Haha, did I say _nothing_ would outlast the freeze? What a mix-up! I meant nothing but fire! Fire is the mightiest! Pele is the mightiest! Winter will never touch her!"

The Earth-Eating Woman tossed her head as if to flip a long sheet of hair, planting her other lava-arm on her hip, and lifted Old Man Winter higher. "_I no needed you_ _to tell me dat!_"

"Let me join you!" the old man screamed. "I'm a great lackey! Just ask - well no they're dead now, so you can't ask them. Just don't kill me! I'll serve the winning side!"

_"If I so mighty, what I need an old lolo can't keep his oaths for? Listen to de Moon's people, Old Man. You undone."_

The lava hand closed around Old Man Winter, muffling his screams.

When Pele opened her hand, only a cloud of dust dropped to the lip of the crater, with something sparkling in the center of it. The figure of the lava woman sagged back into the volcano, and Kīlauea stilled beneath the Guardians' feet.

Jack hopped to the top of his staff in the silence, peering over to the cloud of dust. There in the black rocks lay a lump of ice shaped like -

"Jack!" Bunny, Tooth, and North called as Jack flew to the edge of the volcano, recoiling from landing there as the heat nipped at his feet. He scooped up the glittering lump of ice and flew back to the Guardians, where the lava was still cool enough for him to stand on.

"A heart," Jack said, holding out the lump of ice. "Old Man Winter's heart."

Bunny scoffed. "He had one?"

Fractures ran deep through the heart, some gaping like crevasses in miniature. Jack turned it over, looking at the cracks

"Careful," Bunny backed away slightly from it, as if the heart could still hurt him. "We don't know if it still has his power."

"I...don't think it does," said Jack, pausing to give Bunny a reassuring glance. An "I've-thought-about-this" glance. "I can't feel anything from it, but -"

He looked deeper into the facets of the heart. The ice clung to his skin, but nothing else happened - except that Jack could see something moving, deep in the ice - a picture, though very small.

He brought the heart closer to his eyes, and seemed to be transfixed by something he saw in it. He froze as if having a vision, his eyes unblinking, completely still.

"Jack!" Tooth said, reaching out to him. She touched his shoulder, but he didn't respond.

"A mighty viking pillaged his way through life," Anansi said, suddenly, looking with a distant expression into the glowing smoke of Kīlauea. "Young, and strong, and then - older and stronger."

While Anansi narrated for the rest of the Guardians, Jack found that he couldn't look away as the vision played out of Old Man Winter's life, and he was dismayed by most of what he saw - like the first time Jokul Frosti's strength wasn't enough, when his village was set upon by a larger raiding party. As the invaders pillaged their way horrifically through his people and Jokul Frosti fought back to back with his brother, their chief, hopelessness set in...

* * *

_"They're too strong for us," the chief finally admitted._

_"Yes," agreed his brother, and his sword flashed, severing his own brother's head._

_Jokul Frosti delivered the head of the chief to the leader of the raiding party, tossing it at his feet like a sack of rocks, saying, "I have conquered this village for you."_

_The other Viking ruler said, "your own brother?" But in a tone that was impressed, not horrified._

_Jokul Frosti beamed a terrible grin. "He was a loser. I know the winning side when I see it."_

_He was not, and never became, what anyone would call a kind man._

_But by the time he became old, when he had pillaged his way through life, always on the strong side of victory, when he had settled from raiding life in a village that deferred to him - as those weaklings ought - people might have said he softened a little. At least where his two grandchildren were concerned. After all, he was not harping constantly on them to toughen up, to test their limits, to fight against each other so that they would be prepared to fight the rest of the world into submission. Even though they were bordering on the age of four - well old enough to start lifting a wooden axe that was only barely a toy._

_Sometimes he even hugged the smaller twin, the boy born with a limp that had never gone away._

_"What's that you've got there?"_

_"I found it, grandpa, near the cliffs." _

_The young boy held up a stone he'd chipped out of the rock himself, with the strange imprint of a spiral shell in it. No one had yet named it a nautilus fossil, but someday, someone would._

_Jokul Frosti marveled over it like the treasure it was - not because he knew the value of a fossil, but because his grandson had taken the time to share it with him. "Wow, that is something impressive."_

_"What do you think it is?"_

_"Maybe it's...a dead baby sea monster!" the old man said, tickling his grandson, his laughter filling the air and mingling with the boy's. It was not the mocking laughter Jack had heard from Old Man Winter, but the joyful, bubbling laughter of someone who was primarily concerned with the joy of another._

_"That's gross, grandpa!"_

_Gossip around the village was that Frosti, in fact, loved his grandchildren - even though one was so obviously a born weakling. You would never have caught such softness from the Jokul of old._

_The killing storm whipped in from the northern sea, without a warning in early spring, while the old man and his grandchildren were out by the sea, where the granddaughter loved to run, and the grandson loved to look for treasure in the rocks. They trudged homeward through deeper and deeper snow, the old man's joints stiff and creaking, dragging the two children on as, one after the other, they stopped walking and fell on the cold trail._

_The wind burned the children's skin raw, then black. The snow piled up around them, until they were walled in cold they no longer felt._

_"We'll be home soon," the old man reassured them. "There's a roaring fire waiting - I don't know about you, but I just can't wait to feel warm again."_

_The little girl was still in his arms. The boy's eyes were open just slightly, and his voice was soft as he said, "But I'm all right. I don't feel cold anymore."_

_His expression was placid - and it stayed that way._

_Jokul Frosti wept brokenly, the tears freezing to his face before the wind had time to whip them away. Still, the drive to survive had never left him, so he trudged out into the storm. The wind tore at his cloak and whipped at his wool cap. It stole the air from his lungs and drove him to his knees._

_The world went dark and the cold stole into his heart, into the very core of him, leeching his life away._

_And he thought: _**_Please, not like this._**

_Then the cold was in his bones and the world went dark, even though a farmhouse was within sight. The last thing he felt was misery that turned into the deepest hatred._

* * *

"He died," narrated Anansi, "The old man who had never been defeated - and he chose the winning side."

* * *

_In that nearby farmhouse, a child had been peering out the window, lifting the shutter to see how high the snow was. He'd quickly closed it when he saw a strange shape out in the field, something human, but of the ice and the storm._

_It was just a spark of belief, but it was belief nonetheless. _

_"Inga," he hissed to his sister. "Inga, there's a man made of ice outside. I think it's a frost giant."_

_"There's no frost giant, you're being silly," said his older sister._

_The boy opened the flap again and looked out. The lump that had been in the snow earlier was now gone. Maybe it had just been in his head._

_He turned to his sister. "I don't see it now."_

_"Close the shutter, you're letting the cold in."_

_The boy turned back to see a frostbitten face that eyes with irises as pale grey as the sky during a blizzard, and screamed._

_They were only the first. Some got frozen in their homes, but most were taken as they tried to travel, tried to make it home despite the cold._

* * *

'No one makes it home tonight,' he'd said after putting the shards in Jack's eyes. It hadn't been the first time he'd said it.

Jack pulled back from the vision with a gasp. The other guardians were looking at him with obvious anxiety.

"Jack? You still with us, mate?"

Jack nodded. "He was heartbroken," he said, looking at the heart again.

Bunny's expression hardened, and he snorted at the heart and its fractures. "Yeah, I could see that."

"No, I mean -" Jack wrapped his fingers around the heart, still feeling the utter sadness Jokul Frosti had felt the moment that he felt his grandchildren, first the strong one, then the weak one, die frozen in his arms. "His grandchildren were the only things he ever loved more than himself, and they all died together in a storm - and that killed him more than the cold did. If the only things he ever loved weren't allowed to live in the world, why should anything else?"

A moment of silence hung in the air as Jack and Bunny both processed that, and Bunny's expression twisted.

"So that was behind it," he said, looking away. "He lost his loved ones, and it killed him, so he turned around and tried to do the same to the rest of the world -"

He broke off, clenching his paws into fists, then releasing them.

Jack put his hand on Bunny's shoulder. It took the rabbit a second to look up at him, but when he did, the grief still there was written on his face.

"He was always taking whatever side was stronger," Jack said. "He was willing to die by the Oath rather than live in a world where hope and love could be stronger than the cold...when he'd never given them a chance until the end. He was alone," he said. "Like us - but he never had any hope. And he was so sad, and he never even knew how sad he was, because it took him his entire life to love anything at all. So he hurt a lot of people - he hurt us - because when he finally did love something, losing it broke him that much."

He paused, looking at the heart.

"I don't even really know how to feel about this," said Jack. "He hurt me. He nearly killed me, but -"

He looked at the little clump of ice in his hand.

"This is the part of him - the _only_ part of him - that was good."

It was made of ice. That meant Jack could fix the cracks in it. So he did. For a moment they glowed with blue light, then sealed up, leaving the old man's heart pristine in his hand.

Then, before the others could stop him, he held it to his chest.

"What are you doing?" There was an edge of fear to Bunny's voice. "Jack, no -"

It glowed just slightly and Jack cringed as it passed through his shirt and then his skin. When he looked up at them again, his face looked slightly different. Older, somehow. He now had the tiniest hint of crow's feet around his eyes, though they were more the kind people got in their mid-twenties than the deep wrinkles they relaxed into in old age.

"It's warm. No bleedover. I'm okay." He shrugged. "The rest of Old Man Winter can go rot, but...even in the worst people, aren't the good parts worth saving? If they _can_ be saved..."

Bunny gave Jack his "you've got kangaroos loose in the top paddock" expression. "You didn't know that would be safe! What if his spirit had still been in there and it overpowered you? You could have been - sometimes I just want to -" he clenched his paws, as if wringing an imaginary Jack's neck.

Jack just reached out and hugged him. For a second Bunny stiffened, awkwardly craning his neck to keep glaring - but then he heaved a resigned sigh and hugged Jack back.

"You're never going to stop giving me reasons to worry, are you."

"Being a handful is a full-time job."

"Yeah, well." Bunny squeezed his paw through Jacks' hair once more before letting him go. "Old Man Winter's lucky someone's willing to forgive him, because it's going to be a while before I can."

He chuckled once before realizing that his joke didn't much qualify as a joke, and more as a confession.

"That's okay," said Jack gently. "You have a right not to. Maybe not ever."

Bunny looked at him with a sigh, then at Tooth as she put her hand on his shoulder. North, Anansi, and Sandman crowded around them both, quiet, but supportive as they held their moment of silence on the volcano.

A thought suddenly occurred to Jack. "What are we going to do about the Snow Queen's mirror? Old Man Winter had some of the shards on him -"

Tooth lifted her hand to her mouth in thought. "A lot of them fell in Colorado and the foundry - and he might have saved up more somewhere."

Sandy winced, pictograming a time bomb above his head.

"When we're done taking care of spring, we need to figure out what to do with those," said Jack. "Sandy's 're a problem waiting to happen. I could probably melt them, but if the water still has evil properties -"

"It get you outta my house, I can burn dat rubbish away," said a woman's voice.

They all jumped as a shapely young woman ambled out of nowhere, her white dress stark against her dark skin. She was barefoot, but left red-hot footprints on the lava flow, and the air rippled with heat around her. She held the branches of red berries Bunny had tossed into the volcano's crater and plucked the fruit from them as she walked.

"Well well, an offer of aid from Pele," said Anansi, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a spiderleg. "Certainly not a tale you hear every day."

Pele rolled her eyes impatiently. "Dat Snow Wahine loose in de head," she said, popping a berry into her mouth. "I'da met her, I'da left her all buss up. A mirror dat show only de bad?" she sneered, rolling her eyes. "Waste of a good mirror. As if de bad all dat matter in life! As if de good not make it worth our time. So what's it gonna be, you come back with de mirror, or you puttin' Kīlauea behind you now?"

She sounded as though either resolution would be just fine with her.

"We're honored by your help," said Jack. "I'll gather the shards myself."

"Dat de truth," said Pele, tossing sparks from her long black hair. "By de way," she added. "Rūaumoko is no-o-ot pleased." She chuckled darkly. At Jack's worried expression, she added, "He'd be _furious _if you hadn't cleaned up de lolo's mess, so don't look at me like dat." She rolled her eyes. "_You_ want to keep your eyes on Aotearoa, for de sake a' your children."

Kīlauea shook beneath them, suddenly, as Pele popped another berry into her mouth.

"Aurie - now get out a' my house," she said, calmly, but all of them felt a hot spark of dread in the pits of their stomachs. "But bring more 'Ōhelo, when you come back," she said, sounding pleased. "Dis fit to break de mout'."

With a little wave of her fingertips, she clearly dismissed them. Bunny opened a tunnel into the hot earth and Jack dove in after him, as Tooth, Anansi, Sandy, and North took to the sky before Pele could decide they'd overstayed their welcome.

* * *

"You ready for this, mate?"

"Breaking up a worldwide cold front? Normally I'd complain, but frankly even I could use a break from winter."

Bunny took a sharp turn, rocketing them along at breakneck speed. "Now we've got to be smart about this. The ground's frozen solid, so too much of that snow melts too fast, we've got a worldwide flood on our hands. Stick to un-freezing the ground for now. I'll tell you when it's safe to go to work on the snow. Did you get all that?"

"Ground now, snow later," Jack called. "Got it."

They erupted from the ground onto a snow-covered soccer field next to a cinderblock building, unmistakable as a public elementary school. Grey clouds still roiled overhead, dropping the occasional flake of snow. Jack knew the school - it was Jamie's. The snowbanks outside were so high, the poor kids had likely been trapped inside overnight. Fortunately, his worries about them surviving the cold were assuaged by the clouds of condensation drifting up from vents from the cafeteria. At the very least, they had heat somewhere.

Jack dug his toes into the snowbank, feeling the frozen ground beneath the snow cover and looked at Bunny, who gazed at the blanketed sky.

"First things first mate," he said, looking back at Jack and shrugging skywards. "Think you can shed a little light on the world?"

Jack crouched on the snowbank and grinned. "Bunny, I do that every time I ice up Pitch's undershorts."

He rocketed straight up, the wind that bore him shaking the snow from the pines around the soccer field. He burst through the layer of clouds and into the same burning bright sunshine that had dazzled Annapurna, leaving a gap in the cloud cover behind him.

A single ray of sunshine beamed through the gap, down to the snowy field where Bunny waited. Only he heard the stirring, deep down, of life beneath the piles of snow - the spring that had been waiting, so long, to wake up.

He stamped the ground, and deep in the earth, seeds opened and pushed green shoots through the frozen Earth - slowly, at first, then faster, breaking the frozen ground with single-minded purpose as the first of the ice began to melt.

The first crocus was peeping through the snow when Jack dropped back out of the sky, a high wind pushing the clouds east. They trundled seaward like puffy grey sheep, more rays of sunshine striking the snowy field and the school. Jack's dive earthward carried him in a spiral around the town of Burgess, his staff outstretched, shaking snow from the treetops. Power lines heavy with ice lifted as their burdens melted and dropped, and the lights in the school flared on again.

As Jack landed, he could see a familiar face in the cafeteria windows facing the soccer field. He couldn't hear what Jamie was saying as he called other children over, but his face was alight with relief - and as the other children joined him, their astonishment changed to wonder, and as the icicles around their window began to drip - to hope.

Jack caught Bunny's eye again, landed beside him, and they both grinned.

"Not bad, for the opening act," said Bunny, as the kids crowded around the window, waving, excited, pulling more of their friends over.

They could each feel it - the children's belief building, growing stronger - making them strong.

Jack gripped his staff, his burns from Kīlauea and his weariness from Annapurna forgotten. "Race you to Seattle."

Bunny chuckled, as the last of his injuries from his fight with Old Man Winter disappeared beneath regrown fur. "Frost, you're as slow a learner as you are a flier."

He took off and Jack flew after, laughing.

In the equatorial regions, where the temperature hadn't been cold enough for snow, a few strategically opened tunnels took care of the floodwater. Jack flew overhead as

Bunny zoomed over the snow, flowers growing in his footprints as hope took root in the world, giving both of them momentum.

Jack wasn't sad to shake the snow from the trees. The sight of the tiny buds growing on the grey, bare trees evoked a sense of _rightness _that he'd never regarded them with before.

But then, spring had always been something Bunny had brought in spite of him. It had never been something they'd brought together.

Jack opened the way for spring, sweeping the clouds from the sky, exhilarated with the race to keep up with Bunny's pace - a race he was losing, but happily so. By the time they'd covered half the northern hemisphere, with the floods subsiding, with the green bursting through the snow and the icicles melting, so much relief had settled on the world that Bunny could have finished the job himself.

But he kept stopping, waiting for Jack, with the same look of satisfaction as Jack caught up, bringing the sun with him.

And Jack, who'd never thought he'd see the day when Bunny would do something with him because he wanted to, not because he needed to, was happy to see winter give way to spring for the first time in his second life.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N**: That's a wrap! We'd love to hear what folks think of the story now that it's done.

As for the next one in the series, it's going to be called "The Boy Who Found Fear At Last" and we're going to take a brief break to recharge our writing batteries. We'll likely be posting the first chapter three weeks from now on May 6.

* * *

**The King of Cold Mountain**

by Anders, Kaylin, and Saph

* * *

**Chapter 9**

There was no need for Jack to melt all the snow at once. A few strategic tunnels leading to aquifers meant that the warming temperatures could take care of naturally what Jack was becoming too tired to get rid of.

"So, uh, what day is it anyway?" he asked, when he and Bunny paused back in Burgess, their circuit of the North completed.

"March the 25th. Only a few days left till Easter," Bunny said, scenting the air. Jack briefly wondered how exactly this let him know what day it was. "You know what that means, right Frost?"

"Yeah yeah," said Jack, grinning, waving his hand and leaning on his staff to mask his exhaustion. "Southern hemisphere or bust."

Bunny stamped the ground open. "Need a ride?"

Jack shrugged. "I guess I could use one.

The trip to the other side of the world was a long, gentle slide, and when Jack tumbled through the tunnel into the Warren, he didn't get up, sprawled on the green grass.

He was surprised when Baby Tooth zipped to his cheek, a few more mini-fairies with her. They crowded around him before Tooth's businesslike voice cut into their cooing.

"All right ladies, you can snuggle the gallant hero _after_ we're all caught up. Two bicuspids in Phuket, three in Memphis - that's Tennessee, not Egypt! Those are backdated and just about every set of monkey bars in the _world_ is still icy! Let's go, go, go!"

The mini-fairies dispersed, but now Tooth was hovering over him, her beautiful face beaming with pride.

"What was that about getting caught up?" Jack teased, sitting up on his elbows.

"I've got just enough time to thank the gallant hero." She hugged him, and he hugged her back, glad to be alive and feeling her silky feathers on his cheek, smelling her scent again.

Then she zipped away, snapping out more assignments - "Three in Antwerp! Four in Nurenberg! And take a whole flock to Valparaiso, I don't even know where to begin -"

Jack lay back on the grass, leaning up as he heard North's voice. He and Anansi were talking to Bunny, and Jack caught the occasional "Easter" and "Christmas." Holiday shop-talk. Jack started to push himself up to join the discussion. Christmas was going to need major Guardian support this year, after all, and Bunny had a missed Easter from the previous year to make up for - but Sandy floated up beside him, shaking his finger in a gentle "nope."

Sandy held one hand up, golden dust swirling above it, patting Jack on the shoulder with his other. He came to children when it was time for them to sleep - and in many ways, Jack would forever be a child.

And just then, in every way, he was exhausted.

"You sure I can't help -" Jack said, as Bunny, North, and Anansi suddenly moved off, Anansi and North into the tunnels, Bunny deeper into the warren. Sandy just patted him on the shoulder.

"All right," said Jack, glad to lie back. "Mr. Sandman, bring me a dr-"

Sandy _might_ have rolled his eyes just before knocking Jack out.

* * *

He slept for a long, long time, waking only occasionally to roll over and fall asleep again. The noise of Easter preparations reached his ears, the rumble of many tiny egg-feet and the silky rustle of dye-plants and grass growing thick. It was soothing, like a heartbeat, lulling him back to sleep twice as fast as it woke him up.

At one point, he even woke up to find North snoring on the grass beside him, the yetis and elves snoozing in piles, all tuckered out from the war they'd just fought, and the rebuilding they now had to do.

The Warren felt so suddenly like home in that moment, as a safe place to snooze on the grass with people who had become his family. Jack's heart was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the balmy spring temperature.

Each moment of waking was a moment to revel in being alive, in the simple pleasure of being able to hear and feel and slip gently into warm, soft sleep. In the luxury of rest, Jack slowly got his strength back.

* * *

The Warren was busy for a while, between the yetis and elves staying there temporarily, all drawing up rebuilding plans with North, while Bunny made his usual Easter preparations. They tried to keep the noisiest activity away from where Jack slept, and that was how Tooth managed to get some time alone with him.

The hum of her wings didn't wake him, even though she hovered right above him. She thought Jack looked best when he was awake and active, when he was laughing and smiling and treating the world as his own personal playground. Just then, though, as he lay there sleeping, he was beautiful in another way - and beautiful was the only word that felt right.

His face finally looked peaceful after all the time it had recently contorted into expressions of pain and sadness. There was even the softest curve of a smile at the corners of his mouth. Clearly, whatever dreams he was dreaming were happy ones.

His lips were just slightly parted, soft and inviting. Tooth bit her own lip gently as she gazed at them, his breath just slightly ruffling the grass as he breathed in his sleep. Slowly, she reached out to caress his lip with a feather-light touch.

Ever so carefully, she pushed his top lip up, inhaling to contain her glee as one glimmering white tooth came into view.

The lateral incisor. Tooth had no words for how she felt about Jack's lateral incisor.

It was so wrong of her to sneak a glance while he was vulnerable like this, but oh how they sparkled -

Bunny landed next to her with a thud, egg and paintbrush in paw, startling her away from Jack. "Y'know, you could wait for him to wake up and I'm pretty sure he'd let you stick all the fingers you want in his mouth."

Tooth jerked away from Jack. "I was, uh - I was just -" she cringed, wringing her hands with embarrassment.

"So what is that one, a bicuspid or a molar?" Bunny gestured with the paintbrush at the seductive tooth before flipping it back around to continue painting. "Or is it an incisor? We all know you have a lot of feelings about incisors."

"Oh, hush," she said, fluttering over and whapping him gently on the arm.

Bunny just chuckled at her, putting the egg down and watching it trot off, then picking up another unpainted one as it trundled over. "If you came to check on him, he's fine. Still asleep, but after his week, he's got a right to be tuckered out. I'm going to sleep like a log myself, once this Easter's done with."

Still flushing with embarrassment, Tooth flitted over to Jack's side, kneeling in the grass next to him.

"I don't know how he does it sometimes."

"Is this about his teeth, or something else?" Bunny quipped, setting another egg down to run.

Tooth looked over at Bunny. "What he went through, seeing the world the way he was forced to see it - I don't know if I could've gone as long as him."

Bunny paused in his painting long enough to look at Jack again. "He had a lot going against him, too. If there had ever been a situation to fold, he was in it."

"Why didn't we reach out to him sooner?" Tooth said sadly, the tone in her voice making it clear that it wasn't just for his sake that she wished she'd met him before she had.

"Uh -" Bunny paused, pointing from himself to Tooth with the paintbrush. "Your answer would be different from mine."

One of them had been too busy - the other, too biased.

"I just wish that I'd known..."

Bunny chuckled again. "How pretty his teeth were?"

That got him a cross look at first, but it devolved into a happy sigh. "They are beautiful."

"He's really done a number on you, hasn't he?"

"Hmph!" Tooth replied, not refuting his statement, but avoiding it. "I think it's safe to say that he's had a reasonable impact on us all."

"Not what I meant and you know it," Bunny said, finishing the last detail on the egg he was painting and handing it to her. She took it automatically, glancing down, and-

"Oh!"

"I told you I was gonna paint it on the googs." Bunny's expression was too pleased with himself and not even remotely repentant.

A tiny painted Tooth sat on an equally tiny, painted Jack's lap, his hands at her hips as if resting them there was the most natural thing in the world. The painted couple gazed into each others' eyes in peaceful, pleased silence, just as Bunny had caught them back in the icy tunnels of the Pole when Jack had been recovering from his surge in belief as a new Guardian, and Tooth had taken it upon herself to reassure him that none of what he'd done had angered them.

Tooth put the egg down and chuckled nervously to herself, smoothing back a feather that didn't need smoothing. "Well you know - I mean, you've seen - he's a very _good person _and I appreciate the Guardian he's growing into - even you see that now, right?"

Bunny raised his eyebrows, nodding thoughtfully.

"I saw him refuse to freeze Tikitere," he said, "out of respect for the things that lived there, and the spirits that protected it, even though it meant forfeiting the first challenge to Old Man Winter. Then staying behind to unfreeze it when the old man did, anyway. What was it he said? Ah, that if the old man got his heart, it would be a heart he'd choke on?"

He picked up another blank egg. "And at Kilauea." he paused before going on. "He said that if he hadn't made it across, he was going to let himself burn up. Just to stop the old man from getting his heart. And you know something? I didn't doubt him for a second."

Jack would have done it. He would have died if living meant that the world would be in danger because of it.

"Back at the Tooth Palace, when I said he was a good Guardian, did you already know he was _that _good?"

Bunny's question caught Tooth off-guard, and she paused before answering.

"I hadn't thought ..." she trailed off, pausing again. "I honestly hadn't thought about...about a situation this dire, I suppose."

She hovered, silent for a moment, and the expression on her face was like the moment a flower stops being a bud, and becomes an open bloom. It was like a landslide, or a wave - unstoppable and altering.

"But if I had ... I know the Man in the Moon chose us, all of us, because we were willing to do _anything _for the children. Jack couldn't have been an exception ... but this, what he went through, what he was willing to give up ..." she swallowed, nodding. "That's exceptional."

Her smile was subdued now - but it was laced with much more admiration, and something a little - but not entirely - like fear.

"Aww now," said Bunny, pausing in his egg-painting long enough that the next unpainted egg in line butted up against his foot. "See this?" he gestured at Tooth with his paintbrush again. "_This _is adorable."

Tooth sighed at him. "This is payback, isn't it? For that talk at the Tooth Palace. You're paying me back for that, aren't you."

Bunny just smiled at her. "You've been telling me what I needed to hear for a while, Tooth. It's about time I returned the favor."

"And what is it that I need to hear, exactly?" she asked.

"Maybe that the only people who can't seem to see you've done numbers on _each other _are, well, both of you."

Tooth's mouth hung open just a little at that declaration, and she blushed.

Bunny pushed the painted egg back over to her. "That one's for you to keep. Happy Easter, mate."

He bounded off, back to work, the unpainted eggs toddling after him.

Tooth looked back at Jack, still sound asleep, her expression melting to one of pure tenderness. This was almost too big and frightening to deal with. A simple crush and a desire to get a peep at his teeth was one thing, but she'd spent a very long time mostly keeping to herself and to her fairies, and she'd never once had a chance to truly care for someone in this way. It was completely unknown territory.

Reaching out hesitantly, Tooth brushed a lock of hair out of Jack's face with a gentle caress.

At that, Jack's eyes fluttered half-open and he peered over at her with all the laziness of the half-asleep that want to be whole-asleep. His face broke broke into a broad, beaming smile at the sight of her. He reached his own hand up and brushed his fingers against her cheek, then withdrew and closed his eyes again.

Tooth allowed herself another blush and a smile before zipping through the tunnels back to her own work.

* * *

When Jack woke up - actually woke up rather than just briefly opening his eyes before rolling over and going back to sleep - he was a lot warmer than he was used to. At first he thought that it was just that he wasn't quite used to not being almost frozen solid, but then something kicked him in the head. He reluctantly cracked open an eye, and found himself inches from a drooling elf.

They were piled all over him, in various states of sleep. Ugh. Yeah, not getting back to sleep now.

He sat up, brushing the elves off, and spotted Anansi and Bunny sitting a little way off, talking in quiet voices. Waves of painted eggs were rollicking back and forth in the open space before them, where the warren diverged into the tunnels that lead to the open world. Bunny was still painting, a line of blank eggs filing behind him, but there was a sense of ease about him, and about the warren, that suggested Easter was soon, but well-prepared-for.

Jack left the quiet corner where the yetis and elves still snored (North was nowhere to be seen, but neither was Phil so they were probably back at the Pole rebuilding). He bounded up behind Bunny, scattering the line of eggs and laughing as they toddled around on their unsteady little feet.

"Well, look who finally decided to wake up," said Bunny, looking over his shoulder. "And just in time for Easter. Welcome back, mate."

"Tell me truthfully," Jack said, flopping on Bunny's back like he was a particularly furry couch. "Did the elves do anything to my mouth? Like crawl in? My tongue feels like I licked an elf."

"Wouldn't fit," Anansi answered while Bunny grunted and (reasonably gently) elbowed Jack in the stomach.

"Off," the rabbit said. "I'm not done painting, and your breath stinks."

"No. You're really soft." Jack considered for a moment. "Well no, your fur is soft. _You're_ all sinew. Like a brick wrapped in gossamer softness."

Bunny heaved a sigh. "Sandy broke him, Anansi," he said mournfully. Then, before Jack could add anything in, he spun the brush around in his paw and without even looking back, swept it across Jack's face.

"Ackpth!" Jack recoiled and Anansi and Bunny both laughed.

"Enjoy your mustache," Bunny said as he went back to his eggs. "It matches your jumper."

Jack leaned behind Bunny to look at his reflection in Anansi's shiny carapace, though it was difficult to see properly with the way the Spider was still shaking with laughter. "What - how did you - that's a perfect mustache, how did you do it so fast?"

Bunny spun the paintbrush artfully between his fingers before returning to the egg. "_Centuries_ of practice."

Jack was amused enough over the mustache to not bother trying to wipe it away. He placed his staff down gently and crouched to look at Anansi's eggs.

"Wow, you are nowhere near as good at this as Bunny is." He tilted his head as he looked at Anansi's work. His eggs had web patterns on them - printed with actual webbing - but some of them were overdyed to the point of being mud-colored. "Looks like the Spider found a competition he can't win."

Anansi casually reached over, picked up one of the bowls of paint he was using, and tossed it all over the front of Jack's shirt in one fluid movement.

"That took _no_ practice," Anansi said with a grin. "Isn't it beautiful?"

Jack stood there for a moment, completely aghast at his paint-smeared hoodie. Then his expression turned to one of deviousness. Throw paint on him, would he? Anansi didn't realize he'd just triggered a war that would result in mutually assured destruction.

Jack kicked his staff up to his hand, flying off in an upward burst of wind.

Bunny spoke, distracted, without looking up from his work. "Don't have too much fun. I've wanted to watch the two you have a go at each other for years, but I can't watch a prank war right now."

"What could he possibly do to out-mischief the great Anansi?" Anansi said, going back to his work.

_Splut!_

Anansi rocked forward as the snowball hit him in the back of the head. Some of it dripped over his shoulders and down his shirt, and he looked with a bewildered expression at the brightly colored liquid dripping over his clothes.

Anansi turned, but it was already too late.

_Splutsplutsplut._

Three more snowballs made from the dye river covered the front of his dashiki. Then - _splut! _- another hit him right in the face.

Bunny smirked, still not looking up from his work.

"Lots of things, really," said Bunny. "Like that."

That was when the situation devolved, for lack of a better word, into chaos. Into shoving, kicking, paint-splattering chaos, rife with noogies and headlocks.

"No no, you can't make me eat it. I hate marshmallow, I hate - aaaaugh."

"Hey! You got it in my dreads, you little -"

Anansi wound up a dye-loaded web ball and threw it, hard. Jack ducked and the ball splatted Bunny upside the head.

Bunny froze for a moment, then kept painting, covered in dye and web. "I'm _working,_ you brumbies."

"Ah, come on," Anansi wheedled. "You've been working all week. That's much too long."

"I only _get _one week," Bunny snarked. "And Anansi, if you don't get all this web out of my fur, I _will _stop working to dunk you in the dye river."

Anansi considered this, then meekly scuttled over to pluck the sticky web off of Bunny.

"Hey," said Jack, already bored without someone to throw multicolored snowballs at. "When you're done grooming each other, come find me. I'm gonna try to teach the elves to play monkey-in-the-middle."

"Try" being the operative word there.

Jack bounded off, his laughter filling the vaulted, open space of the Warren as he lept from rock to rock. Bunny set down another egg as Anansi picked the last bits of web from his fur.

"- so you get my worry," he finished, slipping straight back into the conversation he and Anansi had been having before Jack woke up. "Something about him's got Pitch obsessed, in a way I've never seen Pitch obsessed with anything. Meanwhile Jack hasn't even noticed." He watched Jack fly around the tops of the pines on a ridge across from them. "He doesn't know Pitch well enough to realize the things Pitch said to him in the foundry are unusual."

"Remind me," said Anansi, spreading some of the web he'd plucked from Bunny's fur, and briefly looking at a picture in it before crumpling the web into a ball with a disappointed frown. "What were his words?"

"He said -" Bunny paused, scratching behind his ear with the handle of the paint brush. "That it was always about Jack. He woke Old Man Winter up to manipulate Jack into joining him -" here he paused, disbelief coloring his voice. "He was using the _whole world_ as ransom to get Jack on his side. Since when does Pitch try to get people to _join_ him?"

"There are stories," Anansi said. He flicked his hands open, and a web cascaded between them like a cat's cradle. "Unfortunately, they're incomplete." He frowned at the half-formed shapes in them. "I know enough to anger Pitch, but not enough to say why he would fixate on one lonely boy ..."

The spider crumpled the webs beneath his hands. "But I can guess. And what I guess is that Jack has more to fear from Pitch Black than he knows."

Bunny snorted. "That's what I'm saying." His bright green eyes tracked Jack as he lead a line of elves to an open field, inciting them to chase him around for a wadded-up hat that served as a ball. "Pitch is changing somehow. He knew waking Old Man Winter up would mean people would die - not to mention poor Frosty - and he was willing to let that happen just to get Jack to join him. The fear Old Man Winter brought wasn't even his primary reason for waking him up. I don't know what to expect from Pitch next. It just looks like whatever it is will involve Jack."

Anansi nodded, and they watched Jack in silence.

"So." Anansi broke the silence. "How badly are you going to scare him?"

"I'm not," said Bunny. Jack was laughing, dogpiled by elves, and that was exactly how the Guardian of Fun ought to stay. "Pitch is weak right now and Jack is a powerhouse now that Old Man Winter's out of the picture forever. He doesn't need to be afraid. But I'll keep an eye on him - and_you _keep an eye out for those stories."

"Nobody tells the Spider what to do."

Bunny just laughed. "The Easter Bunny just did."

Anansi laughed as well. "You know, after so many years in the shadows, I think I am looking forward to being bossed around by an old friend."

They smiled at each other, and there were centuries of stories untold as they both went back to work on their eggs.

Anansi added, "Not that it means I'll listen. I'll just like hearing it."

Bunny snickered, but kept painting.

* * *

_When spring was born, so goes the story, custodians were born to attend it._

_Rabbit-shaped and rabbit-quick, the pookas maintained the warren that was their home, that was the home of spring, and under their care that sacred center teemed with life and order. And so it was in the rest of the world._

* * *

"You're not going to go into the disturbing details again? I mean, anything that could be considered gratuitously unfortunate –"

The spider-legged Guardian of Stories rolled his eyes at the snow-haired Guardian of Fun. "I will keep it inner-child friendly."

"Okay, good."

Jack settled into his snowbank on Kilimanjaro. He was comfortable there in that snow that never melted, enough not to mind in the slightest that spring was unfolding in full force throughout the northern hemisphere.

It was Easter Sunday. Spring should have been unfolding.

He nodded to Anansi, sitting beside him on a snowless rock. "Okay, so, what happens next?"

"Where was I?" Anansi scratched his chin with a spiderleg. "Ah yes - and so it was with the rest of the world."

* * *

_They were accustomed to the belief waxing and waning with the year. Like the moon, its effects were not always visible, but its presence was always with them. Even the timid ones who never left the warren felt it, the replenishing undercurrent of human belief in their existence causing the tiny spring fairies to flourish as spring itself caused plants, children, creatures of all kinds, to do._

_The warren was a well of life beneath the surface of a part of the world so dangerous, the few that dared to surface there were either spoken of as legend - or with regret for their passing. Life does not go without death - even for those whose work is to attend life itself._

_Back then, the myth of a singular Easter Bunny was still only that. There were many pooka, and together they moved and were moved by the seasons, covering the world with the treasures of spring. Even so, there were some who ranged farther, who saw more, were seen more, who inspired the lion's share of the belief. And there were some even the boldest looked up to._

_One ranged farthest and fastest. He was young, but old enough to have had the rashness of youth raked out of him. Fear was not his master, because that which was small, that which was almost defenseless, as were they all, needed the warning of fear - but needed not to be paralyzed by it._

_He braved the company of the Centzon Totochtin, whose belief was soaked in blood, and brought back the cacao that would become Easter chocolate. In summer, when belief made hares of the bold, he covered the continents of Africa and Australia, escaping the jaws of predators as often by trickery as much as by speed. And every tale of survival, told to the timid who rarely left the warren, to the young who were itching to stretch their legs in the dangerous world, be it a tale of humor, of guile, of the triumph of the small and quick and clever over the large and slow and strong - every tale cultivated the same thing. Hope, hope for a new day, for a next adventure, for survival in a dangerous world. And on that hope, they thrived._

_And that hope, they cultivated. Every one of them, to a number, knew how it felt to be cold, or hungry, or afraid - or all three. Every one of them knew the value of hope. Children, small and vulnerable, were as much like them as humans got. They could be the most hopeful, or they could need hope the most. And so they brought hope, when they followed spring across the world, leaving gifts in shoes and on doorsteps. Our friend was not the first to think to leave gifts, but he was the first to hide them, to make a game and a lesson of it as well as a sign that spring had come again._

* * *

"Yeah, I never told anyone this, but I always liked Easter. The kids have a great time, get all sugared up, run around screaming -"

"Thank you for that essential observation. May I continue?"

"Keep going."

* * *

_So it was for ages - the little society flourished under the dry desert, and winter and spring came to the world in their time._

_When winter grew ambitious and thought to end spring forever, our friend was alone, as was the way of rangers such as him, beneath the brilliant stars. Why he sought solitude in the open outback that night, instead of safety in his snug home, I will not say - but it involved an argument that was never to be resolved._

_He was there to -_

* * *

"Wait a minute. You told me how many Trickster Hare stories without permission, hit me with that...that piece of gratuity in the coral cave when I was already this close to giving up on life, and _now_ you have a sense of discretion?"

"Ah, you have observed a contradiction in my character! Yes, Frost Spirit, good sense of narrative. You're very smart. Now shut up."

"But -"

"'He was there to -'"

* * *

_- to see the skies darken and the full force of winter bear down upon his home, and he was fast, but not fast enough to reach them in time for a warning, or to be caught as one of the casualties. The sight he found when he reached the wreckage was grotesque - but you know that tale already._

* * *

"Thanks a lot for that."

* * *

_The Guardians, newly formed by the Man in the Moon, found him and heard his story. Their fight against Old Man Winter was renewed at this reminder of the scope of his cruelty, and that battle lead them to Antarctica, to a battle to test them to the edge of their skill._

_Jokul Frosti's Antarctic fortress withstood the onslaught of the Sandman, the Tooth Fairy, and Nicholas St. North, and Old Man Winter himself was delighted to keep them at bay. Despair had made him strong. Many deaths had made him stronger, and hopelessness reigned. For fear, when it sets in, is hard to overcome, and there is no adult alive who doesn't worry, just a little bit, when the cold starts to bite too much._

_As they fought, the last survivor of the spring warren did his best to cover ground that was too great for a tiny creature, to bring hope to people who had too much hunger, too much cold, and him with not nearly enough for all of them._

_But that is the beauty of hope - fear spreads fast, but so does hope, from the open hearts of one child to another._

_He, who was as changeable as the belief that made him strong in the summer and small in the dark cold, could feel it in the softness of himself, in the towering of even grass. Hope was very weak._

_But it was not dead yet._

_The Guardians fought bravely, and to their last breath, when hopelessness began to touch even their hearts._

_Jokul Frosti fought as if the battle were already won, and in many ways, he had - so all three Guardians were that much more surprised when, mid-battle, the mighty Old Man Winter simply lay down and slept._

_The Tooth Fairy and Nicholas St. North looked at the Sandman for an answer, but he had none for them. Old Man Winter had simply made good on his taunts that the fight they put up was so boring, he would do as well to nap as he would to continue fighting._

_Their surprise continued when they returned to a world that was no longer snowed over, but bursting with spring - with vines overgrown and flowers springing from the cracks between pavement, and the pollen - oh, the pollen. And eggs - eggs, everywhere._

* * *

Jack snickered. "I heard about the eggs. Tooth said they started to smell after a while."

"I am ever so impressed by your ability to remember things somebody told you. Did you come here to tell a story, or hear one?"

"By all means. Do continue," Jack said with a slight flourish of his hand, utterly unphased by Anansi's barbs.

"I just will." Anansi settled onto his rock, dusting some stray snow from it. "Back to the eggs - everywhere - yes, Frost Spirit, starting to smell."

* * *

_The Guardians picked up a new chase - to find the source of the spring that was overgrowing the world, and bring him back to senses that an overabundance of belief had bowled over._

_They caught up to him and he was not as they remembered. Where the stubborn pooka they recalled had been small enough to fit inside the boot of Nicholas St. North, the pooka they found was nearly two meters from his hind feet buried in the grass to the tips of his long ears swinging in the pollen._

_He'd had the work of a thousand to do. And the faster he ran, the harder he worked to do it, the more children he had reached - the more children had believed that he could._

_And so he had._

_"Are we sure is same Bunny?" North asked, of Sandman and Toothiana, when they spotted the grey blur shooting across the Mongolian plains. The reindeer had to run very fast indeed to keep up, but North pushed them as only he could._

_The last pooka, catching sight of them, spared them only a short glance and a shout._

_"Shouldn't you be fighting the old man?"_

_"Old Man is fought!" North crowed. "Sleeping in the ice, like frozen head of fish. Is good work you have done! Now maybe, is time to rest? Before smell of rotten egg is covering __**all**__ the planet, phoo."_

_The Easter Bunny didn't break stride as he raised an eyebrow at North. "Yeah, good one. Look, I said it was an honor but I've got to do the work of a thousand, and in case you haven't noticed, there's only one of me. I don't have time to talk."_

_The Tooth Fairy shouted after him - "But you already have!"_

_"Talked too much! I know!"_

_He put on a burst of speed that none of them could match - and would have gone on, if the Sandman had not cut off his path with a wall of sand. He skidded to a stop, stamped his foot in frustration, and paused with surprise as the ground opened up for him. In that pause, the Tooth Fairy had zipped to his side._

_"No, you've already done it," she insisted, hovering over the tunnel that lead to the other side of the sand wall, blowing away in the wind of the plains. "There's spring on every continent, even the ones where it's supposed to be fall. You need to give the world a rest, now."_

_"How can I stop?" the last pooka refrained from jumping down the rabbit-hole, only because doing so would mean pushing the Tooth Fairy out of the way first, and there had not been a single bringer of hope who did not regard her and her work with the utmost respect - for hope rides so heavily on memory. "The Old Man is going to notice any minute. The people need food. When he comes back, they need to be ready -"_

_"Old Man Winter is asleep," Toothiana insisted, "He went to sleep because of you. Because you did it - look at you! You've _done_ the work of a thousand," she persisted. "Everyone believed you could. You __**gave **__them a reason to believe"_

_The Easter Bunny glanced at himself, as if only just noticing that he was six feet tall, that his weapons no longer fit his hands._

_The Tooth Fairy put her slim hands over his paw._

_"You need to rest now," she said, her voice gentle, plying him down from the madness of being so suddenly, so solely believed in. "You can. You did it."_

_For a moment he was still, but when he looked up, there was a deep fear in his eyes._

_"I can't stop," he insisted. "If I stop, if the work is over, then I have nothing to do but -"_

_The Sandman and North stood by, their distance respectful. Death had touched their lives - murder had taken their acquaintances - but not so personally. And not at such a scale._

_But the Tooth Fairy had reasons to understand the weight of working alone - and the sorrow of loved ones taken before their time._

_"You will always have your memories," she said. "Whenever you need them. That's a promise."_

_In the quiet of that moment, coming down from the rush of power that comes with suddenly having the belief of a thousand, the Guardian of Memories' consolation finally stopped him long enough for the grief he had outrun to catch up._

_With no work left to distract him, he broke like a blade of grass bending to a strong wind. Toothiana caught his shoulder as he fell, half from the downslide of being overbelieved, half from grief._

_He did not ask, as he wept and she tried not to in sympathy, how he would endure. He already knew how - with memory, and with hope._

_The broken moment was short. When he stood again, unsteady, the Sandman and North stepped forward in concern as he stamped another tunnel open._

_"I do have more work to do," he said, but quiet and calm. "Just - not here."_

_He left them, returning to the task of clearing his home of his dead._

* * *

"And then, after hundreds of years, came a frost spirit-"

"You can skip this part," said Jack. "I already heard it."

"Oh but I had more to say," said Anansi. "And it was so nicely worded."

Jack considered. "Okay - fine, I guess you can say them."

"You are kind to give me permission."

* * *

_And then, after hundreds of years, came a frost spirit, laughing as he undid the work of spring._

_'Boring,' Jack Frost said, as if the seasons were a game he could decide not to play, 'I think I'm just going to ignore it.'_

_And it was a long time before he was able to see Jack Frost as anything but a potential threat to everything being allowed to happen when it ought._

_But that, too, came, in its time._

**_Just_**_in time._

* * *

"After that," said Anansi, drawing his story to a close, looking out over the African savannah with almost a sort of wistfulness, "My friend was never the same. But I would not say that tragedy had broken him - I would say that in the face of hardship, he had become more himself. But at the same time, he had lost something of himself - or buried it, in the face of responsibility."

He turned to Jack. "But sometimes, fate plays a long game. I do not believe the ending of my friend's story has been written yet, but if I were to hazard my expert guess -" his eyes twinkled behind his lenses - "I would say the ending has a better chance now than it did three hundred years ago of being a happy one."

Jack sat silently in the snows of Kilimanjaro, the African countryside unrolling around and below him as small flurries danced in the breeze. The sun had set on Africa, the story told, and the last of the light was fading from the sky.

After a moment, he stood up and nodded to Anansi.

"Thanks," he said. "Thanks for the story. I'm glad it's not over."

The wind rose up and blew him into the sky, carrying him south and east.

The evening was passing over the world, bringing Easter Sunday to a close, and Jack reached the entrance to the Warren under cover of darkness, in the welcoming cool of the Australian outback at night.

There was a back entrance that Bunny had finally told him about, one only the Guardians could get through. It took him some time to find it, hidden at the base of an acacia tree. He slipped in, and nodded at the Sentinel egg on guard there. It stood aside, acknowledging him as a friend, and he followed the winding tunnels until they opened up to the bright space of the warren.

Bunny lay on the grass, awake, but seemingly lost in thought. His ears perked up and his nose twitched as he sensed Jack's presence in his home, but he didn't get up, and he looked pleased to see him.

"You just missed Bilby," he said, as Jack landed on the grass beside the reclining rabbit. "She stopped by for a bit of shop talk. Five minutes earlier and you coulda said g'day."

"Too bad - wait, hold on,_ she_?"

Bunny tilted his head to raise an eyebrow at Jack. "You didn't know Bilby was a Sheila? What rock were you sticking your head under?"

"She's a bilby. I didn't even know what a bilby was until I met her, how would I know the difference between male and female ones?" Jack said, sitting down in the grass and laying his staff down. "Why do you call ladies 'Sheila' anyway? How does that work if their name actually is Sheila?"

"It's an Aussie thing, Seppo," Bunny chuckled. "That's up to whoever names their kid Sheila."

Jack sprawled out shoulder to shoulder with Bunny, digging his toes into the grass.

"I'm surprised you aren't in a coma right now.

Bunny inhaled a deep, satisfied breath. "With all these kids busy Believing? This was a good one. Maybe good enough to make up for last year. I feel like I could do a week of Easters."

"I saw 'em having fun out there when I flew up to North's earlier." Jack had been doing his part helping with the rebuilding, and of course, had been reveling in North's company. (His very _alive_ company.) "I'm pretty sure most of the parents of the world are never going to forgive you for the worldwide sugar rush pandemic going on right now."

"They'll have their vengeance through Tooth," Bunny chuckled. "Every year, the same lecture - always about caramel." He shrugged. "I try to deserve it." He paused, his expression distant. "They were having fun, weren't they?"

Jack turned his head to smile a wide smile at him.

"They were. I think - for once - you put me to shame. Kinda reminded me of -" Jack stopped for a second.

"Of what?"

"Easter of 1707," Jack went on slowly. "I remember - I had to climb up into the trees to shake the eggs out of the branches for the other kids. That'd been a hard winter that year. We'd been having trouble just getting regular meals but then Easter came and it was like sweets were actually falling from the sky."

Bunny sat up to look at him thoughtfully.

"That was back when you were - whoever you were before you were Jack Frost? A kid?"

"Jackson Overland," Jack said. "My name was Jackson Overland. I lived in Burgess - before it was Burgess, anyway. When it was still a colony. Before..." He swallowed thickly. "Before. Like I told you guys, I remembered a lot of it when I opened up the puzzle box of my teeth. The rest has been coming back to me ever since."

"Those were hard times," Bunny mused. "Tough people. Needed a lot of strength to get through those winters. Always tried to give them something to really look forward to." He paused, thinking. "Can't say if I remember seeing you. I never get to stop to watch the fun very long."

Even for him, the whole world was a lot to cover in a day. He didn't always get to hang around to see how his work was received.

He sat in silence for a moment, then suddenly went on, "Anansi said something about you that was out of turn, even for him, back on Vancouver Island. It's not my place to pry, and none of us will, but you know, if you ever want to talk about your life before - about how you became Jack Frost -"

He caught Jack's eye, looking solemn. "You ever want to talk about it, I'll listen. We all would."

Jack shrugged. "There's not much to talk about. I wasn't lying back when I told you guys I saved my sister and got turned. We went ice-skating and the ice was too thin and I got her off it, only it meant I slipped over where she'd been standing..."

He shrugged.

"She was lighter than me and it'd been cracking under her. I was heavier - you do the math. I woke up later and didn't remember anything. Who I was, where I'd come from - _what_ I was... I was confused and - and scared. But I saw the moon looking down at me and he told me 'Your name is Jack Frost.' And then that was it."

Bunny frowned, but not at Jack. "That doesn't make a lot of sense, on the Man in the Moon's part. He really ignored you for three hundred years?"

Jack nodded and looked sidelong at Bunny. "He...did he talk to you guys? At least sometimes?"

"He hasn't talked to me much, but he didn't wait three hundred years to make me a Guardian. You know the others were the first, right? He picked 'em all together, minus Anansi, but I didn't join up 'til later. 'Course I was already trying to protect the kids and whatnot - what with one thing and another, they were all I had. When he added me to the team, it was probably because I was making it my business anyway. He didn't talk to me before that. And I gave him a lot of chances. Spent some time moon-gazing after the, ah. After the old man."

He trailed off.

"Anansi told me," Jack said. "He told me your story."

"Ah." Bunny paused, with a sigh. "Well. I said you could ask for It. Old bounce didn't traumatize you too much, did he?"

"No, this time, he emphasized the bits about how absolutely awesome you were and how the story was probably going to have a happier ending than it might have had before."

Bunny laughed, then looked thoughtful again. "A happier ending, huh? Can't say I have a problem with any of that." He settled back into the grass. "So your sister - you don't wanna talk about it, you stop me any time but - she must've really known you cared about her. Something like that, you take with you all your life."

Hopefully she'd been able to make something positive out of it, instead of being overwhelmed by the loss of her brother. It was what he tried to put into the world - hope that let the kids bounce back from tragedy, but mortals could be so easily overwhelmed by despair.

"That's something to be proud of. But you've got a lot to be proud of."

"I hope she knew. She had to have known, right?" Jack asked, craning his neck to look at Bunny again.

"She had to," Bunny agreed.

"Sometimes I think -" Jack paused. "Maybe Manny took my memories because he thought I'd be too unhappy if I knew she was my sister, but she couldn't see me. Maybe he thought starting over was best for me."

"Do you think that?"

"I don't know," said Jack, frowning at the ceiling of the warren. "Maybe. It would have made me sad, but -"

But three hundred years was too long to go without giving him anything - but they could second-guess Manny all year.

"How does that work?" he asked. "When something that bad happens - when you lose someone so important, and you_ know _they're important, how - how do you just go on?"

Jack hadn't done that himself - not first-hand, not with immediacy.

Bunny paused again before answering.

"When the worst thing happens," he said, speaking an answer he'd already given a lot of thought - "once you make it through that - you know you can make it through anything." He paused. "That doesn't mean it won't be hard, when terrible things happen again. You just know that you can come through to the other side of hardship. No matter how much it feels like you'll never have reason to smile again, you will. You'll find it, or it'll find you. You make new reasons - new family."

Jack seized on that. "That's one of the things I came here to talk to you about, actually." He sat up again. "I wanted to thank you. Not for all the other stuff - you already know I'm grateful for the magical unicorn tears of healing. For the other stuff."

"Hey. Those were magical pooka tears and you know it." But Bunny grinned. "What other stuff?"

"Before all this, for a while, I was feeling kind of lonely. I felt like I needed more time from you guys than you had to give. This last year, it's the been the first time in all the time since I - that I had people."

"Ah." Bunny paused, considering. "Well, you're welcome. Sorry it took a mortal enemy and a near-death for me to get there."

"I'm not finished. I just... the thing is I don't _need_ to be around you guys to stop feeling lonely now. Because of what you did. Because you made it clear that you..."

Jack just trailed off into silence.

"Yeah, feelings. Not used to talking about feelings. Fill in the blanks. Treat it like emotional MadLibs."

"Mad what?"

Jack just shook his head. "It's a kid's word ga - never mind. Just -" he smiled, digging down deeper for some feelings words. "You guys are - you're the most like a family I've ever had, in three hundred years, the most like having a family that I can completely remember." He shrugged. "Now that I know the feeling's mutual, I don't feel like I have to cling as much to... to anyone who'll pay attention to me."

He wasn't afraid of losing the good things that had come so suddenly to him, in the form of being a Guardian. He wasn't afraid he'd be cast out for his mistakes. He wasn't afraid that he'd never truly belong.

Those worries had nagged at him so long, but now, it was like they had drifted away like snowflakes on the wind, never to be seen again.

"But I still like being around you guys. So I was thinking," he went on, glancing over at Bunny. "I don't know if you've noticed this, but Easter - it's a day for the kids, yeah, and they have a good time, but afterwards, I always saw them go back to their families. After the egg hunts and the candy and everything. It's not just a day for kids, it's a day for family. So I was thinking ... maybe after you're done working, each year, once all the eggs are hidden and the kids have found them, maybe I could come back here. You know. For Easter evening. If you wanted."

He glanced hopefully at Bunny, but he didn't have to wait long before getting a smile from the rabbit.

"I'd like that," Bunny said, with a soft smile and a grateful nod.

Jack smiled too. The feeling of being home - of having a home to come back to - was starting to feel wonderfully familiar.

"So, ah -" he said, glancing around the warren, his eyes landing on the pictograms that he'd mocked once. Now that he was looking with an informed eye, he could see they obviously weren't Bunny - none of them had his markings, and each had individual characteristics marking them out from each other. "I had my sister. Did you have any sisters?"

Bunny chuckled. "A dozen."

"Seriously?"

"Bunnies," said Bunny meaningfully, raising his eyebrows. Jack nodded with a silent 'oh,' in understanding. "Lotta big families lived around here."

It was strange to think that the Warren, which already felt like it teemed with life, could have been teeming with more - and yet once it had been a near-dead tomb. "So, they're buried here?"

Bunny shook his head. "After all this time, no. You bury anything in Earth, after enough time, it becomes Earth. They aren't buried in the Warren anymore. They _are _the Warren."

Jack tilted his head back to look at the green, growing space beneath the desert, the soft light shining through the cavernous grass and leaves were alive with the whirring of insects and the sound of was nothing tomb-like about it.

"Do you do anything for them? Like, a memorial of some kind?"

"Every year, mate. It's called Easter."

And he'd snowed Easter out before. A slight barb of guilt pinged Jack again.

"Well," he said, stretching, his tone lighthearted. "Don't expect any more snow days for you. You better bring your A-game, from now on, 'cause I'm not giving you any more breaks."

Bunny snorted. "I'll try to contain my disappointment."

Jack stood up, looking at the pictograms some more. "Are you okay with talking about them?" he jerked his thumb at a repeated individual, the rabbit with the lab coat and goggles. "Who's this guy, anyway?"

"Him?" Bunny sat up, and his smile was proud. "I guess if you were going to call anyone _the_ Easter Bunny before me, it would've been him. Taught me everything I didn't make up myself."

"Did he make up the exploding egg trick, or was that you?"

"We worked on those together. Different variations, you know?"

"And, uh -" Jack paused. "Did either of you ever think to trick each other by replacing the explosives with glitter?" he grinned wickedly. "Because I did that. I was gonna let it be a surprise, but all this time and you've never even used it -"

For a moment Bunny stared at him, half perplexed, half indignant.

Then he burst out laughing - real, deep, gut-busting laughter. Like he'd never laughed at one of Jack's pranks before.

Jack only grinned back. "I tried to be patient and see if you'd use it. I really tried, but patience isn't exactly my center."

"Imagine if I'd pulled it on Pitch," said Bunny, wiping a laughter tear from his eye. "Good luck to that old ratbag spreading fear when he's shinier than Tooth -"

He whipped an egg - the last of the ones he hadn't used in all the fighting they'd done previously - from his harness and threw it at Jack, nearly too fast for the eye to follow. Jack didn't have time to dodge before the egg exploded in a glimmery, glittery cloud all over him.

"Oh this is too good," Bunny kept laughing. "We're keeping this one. Pitch won't have an ounce of dignity left."

Jack stood there, covered in glittered, blowing it out of his mouth.

"You're dethpicable." Jack went on, "And also furry. I wonder how hard it'll be to get glitter out of fur, huh?"

He launched himself at the rabbit for a full body hug, aiming to rub the glitter off like Bunny was a giant walking towel.

Bunny flipped him over and onto the ground with a practiced, fluid movement, stepping back with his arms open, a minimal amount of glitter stuck to him. "Mast of t'ai chi, Jack - you're gonna have to be a little faster than that."

Jack scrambled to his feet and laughed as he hurled a snowball in Bunny's face, darting through the air towards him again.

Bunny zipped off at not-quite-full speed, trailing snow and glitter, leading Jack in a mad chase around the Warren.

Shouts of challenge and gleeful laughter filled the space, as it had not in centuries, as the spirits behind winter and spring played, really played, as one was born to do - and as one had not done in centuries.

As they did, a sense settled on the world of some deep rightness, a sense that had not been there for many centuries. Other spirits felt it, and marked its significance, understanding that a change was taking place, for the better.

It was in the earth, in the water, in the air - a balance that had been missing from the world, that had been struck off by evil and ambition, that had endured on the pain of wounds that had never had the medicine to properly heal.

Winter and spring were in balance - playing in the sacred place where all life in the world had risen.

Even the mortal humans felt it, in varying degrees, and for a few moments, that sense of rightness permeated the world.

The world was far from perfect - but things were better now. From loss and loneliness, hope had risen - and fun had caught up to stand with it.

And to be dunked in the dye river.

* * *

There was a dark place underground that the light of the world hadn't touched for centuries. Unlike Pitch's lair, which had _never_ been touched by the sun, this place had once been open and bright. Long ago, it had stood alongside a river and its cavernous halls had been alive with story and song. Now its bright walls were dingy and gray and its tapestries were fraying and falling apart where they hung on the high walls. They should have long since completely disintegrated but there was magic in this place that preserved them somewhat. It was old magic.

It had taken Pitch quite some time to find it. Though he knew of many places that had been swallowed by the dark - and though he knew what could be considered the "back entrance" in the shadows - what he'd needed was to find where this place opened up to the surface world and how to get there that way.

He'd finally found the way in.

He already knew the way out, because it was only through the dark.

That meant it was perfect for his purposes.

In the biggest room, there was a table, large and round, with thirteen seats. One was meant to remain empty until the right person sat in it. Death had been thought the punishment of whoever sat there if they were unworthy - and in a way, a kind of death was - but Pitch knew better.

It was not an instant death. It was not a kind death. It was not even a physical death. If the wrong person sat in that chair, they were consigned to the dark. To many, physical death was a much less frightening alternative.

Humans always _did_ like to rewrite their reality to something more pleasant than it was.

A warning had been left on the wall, carved in with magic fire. Ombric's wizard apprentice had always been such a killjoy. Pitch supposed he'd done it long after the glory of this place had faded, after it had been swallowed by the Earth.

"You'd think he'd have had better things to do than graffiti the walls after being trapped under a rock for that long," Pitch said to one of the night-mares that was with him.

Then again, he'd likely been mad by then. It certainly would explain the shoddy job he'd made of properly locking this place up.

At least it was all to Pitch's benefit.

With a wave of his hand, nightmare sand poured forth and scoured the message from the wall, sandblasting the words away until a flat surface remained. Then it went to work, scouring new words in their place.

"That should do it," said Pitch. "It's time to deal with him _properly_. I should have thought of this ages ago."

It was right then that he realized he had reached into the depths of his robes, in the darkness there that acted like a pocket, and that his hands touched cold metal. Somehow he'd done it without realizing he had. That was always the way it worked; he never remembered reaching his hand for the little metal object - he just found himself holding it without knowing why.

It happened so rarely - centuries had passed before in between times he'd taken a look at it - that sometimes he almost forget he carried it with him. Pitch drew the locket out of his pocket and stared at it like it was some alien thing that had fallen from the stars; and as always, he didn't understand why he'd unconsciously reached for it.

It was such an unremarkable thing, a simple oval made of gold, the surface etched intricately, the chain gold as well. It was beautiful, but not remarkable in any way.

He didn't know why he kept it. He didn't know why he sometimes had the desire to open it and why he feared what he'd find inside. He didn't know why, during those many times that he'd tried to make himself throw it away, he'd always found himself putting it back safely where he carried it.

He also didn't know why he sometimes had the urge to take it out whenever he was about to do something that some people might have considered irrevocably and horrifically irredeemable.

Just like all those other times, after staring at the locket and repressing the urge to open it, he tucked it away again.

The night-mares stared at him and he felt anger rising - at them, at the locket, and above all else, at himself.

"What are you looking at?" he snapped and they whinnied and drew away.

Pitch looked back at the wall and smiled.

"You know what they say: if you can't join them...beat them," he said. "We're going to have _my_ kind of fun this time."

Then he and the night-mares melted into shadows that were older than nations.


End file.
